His main artistic focus was The Hill of James Magee, an art installation located in the Chihuahuan Desert, one hour and twenty minutes outside of El Paso.
[3] He then lived in New York for ten years, where he worked diverse jobs such as cab driver, union welder[5] and assistant to Tommy Koh, the Singapore Ambassador to the United Nations.
[4] He was, however, intimately involved in the artistic activity of his dear friend, the painter Annabel Livermore,[8] whom various writers have described as his alter ego, a relationship referred to by The New York Times as "a tough act to follow.
[10] According to Kerry Doyle, director of the Rubin Center at the University of Texas at El Paso, in "Letters to Goya", Ms. Livermore, a retired librarian from the Midwest, "took up painting later in her life to great success and whose work has been exhibited in museums across the United States and collected by both individuals and institutions.
[5] These titles were created over the decades, and were, according to Kerry Doyle, "read aloud/performed by the artist as a complementary practice, again finding their home in a middle place, something between spoken word poetry and performance art".
"[1] To get to The Hill, one must drive through the desert, "harsh, gently hilly, unremitting bright in the day, black at night, silent but for the wind and the occasional car or truck or perhaps the shriek of a mouse caught by a hawk", as Richard Bretell has written.