The Mississippi river is thousands of years old and brand new every second.  And no one passes through the same river twice.

In the past two years I’ve played music on a dinner boat on the Mississippi River for the past couple years, and one day on the boat I noticed something.  Our boat passed a freight barge, and the side of the barge had  different tiered layers and color textures on it.  To me it literally looked like a painting, with the combination of paint faded by the sun, rust, corrosion, and the wear and tear of years of river water, freezing and thawing, and passing through (maybe sometimes scraping through) different locks going up and down the river.  I never had a chance to take a picture with my phone but I remembered the textures and beautiful colors I saw on some of these boats and barges.

I made a series of paintings with this “Riverworn” idea as my inspiration.  In a similar way to how many different environments and circumstances created these colors and textures on the boats on the river, I used a wide variety of medium on the canvas, including acrylic paint, watercolors, oil pastels, crushed charcoal, and more.