"One of my early memories was lying in my bed at night listening to thoughts in my head,  realizing everybody in the world had thoughts and WANTING TO KNOW THEM.  It’s why I loved to read.  It was as close to getting into someone’s head as you could get. 

I also loved drawing.  I quit art as an major in college because I’d only drawn and I was in over my head.  In fact, I dropped out of college completely for a year, returning a year later an English major, surviving being duped into selling magazine subscriptions in college dorms and working as a Winn-Dixie grocery sign painter.

After teaching English for 16 years, raising a child, becoming and unbecoming an illustrator, a paper salesman, a poet, and a potter of sorts, I came back to art.  In 2008 I painted my first successful painting.

I am a figurative painter.  I want to paint people’s thoughts, filtered through my head and through my brush.  I want to present a situation, and pose to viewers a question they can solve by engaging their story-telling imaginations.  I want to draw the viewer into the picture through design, value, and texture.  Color, for me, is an afterthought, although I am getting less afraid of color these days.

I make my art by either responding to a photograph I’ve taken (as I have in my “Hooked” series) or I give over my subject to chance or chaos, covering my canvas with collage, random marks or stamping so that my subject matter reveals itself to me, rather like finding objects in cloud formations (as in my “Imaginary Women” series.)

My two approaches to painting seem to manifest from opposite sides of my brain, but what connects these two sides is my intuition, which chooses a particular photo or finds a subject matter in the chaos of a canvas of random marks and additives."

Education