Painted outdoors after witnessing wing-like clouds floating at sunset over Big Bend National Park, this painting gathers found and remembered materials from that stunning landscape: ancient snail shells as traces of an inland sea, the golden hour, and a jeweled sky commune in a protective cosmology. For this work, I combined two automatic drawings tracing the memory of that sunset and the way the moonbeams filled the sky soon after. Amulet reflects my ongoing interest in nature’s elegance as ornament and shield. Its beauty is spiritual. A small talismanic painting, I imagine it a vessel for protection and reverence.