About me...

Pablo Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up."

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I began life in 1948 New England where the works of Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Winslow Homer were a great influence. And I had an elder, a naturalist and forester, for a mentor. He introduced me to the classical minds in books and the practical experiences of naturalists/artists like the great Roger Tory Peterson and the imagination of Mark Twain.

 

While still young, I left the North for a Southern life of work, where, after 44-years of non-stop working for others in the STEM and military worlds, I decided to retire and "work" for myself, but as an artist.

 

At age six, I'd begun pencil drawings that led me into Art League classes for two summers. There, where I was too young to join the "upstairs study" sessions after lectures, I stayed in the basement studio working in clay one year, watercolor another.

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For projects and classes over the years  since, I've worked in various mediums: clay, wood sculpting/carving, watercolor, acrylic on canvas or panels and graphite on paper drawings and digital. My undergraduate work in Earth Sciences included a lot of drawing, particularly of land forms. And all around me, life was happening: training & education, military service, graduate work, marriage, mortgage, kids, dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens, horses, endless mowing...but now there's a nap for that (nap, not app).

 

Lately, with a few breaks for the wood sculpture/carving and acrylic on canvas projects, I've been interested in graphite on paper projects. However, I neither specialize nor seek an overarching theme. Instead I work by my own maxim: don't burden the mind with mastery, let it be free to imagine. Or, to quote Picasso once more, "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."