Artistic Statement

My initial interest in art began with a love for drawing.  Line and the endless variety of shapes it could create seemed almost magical.  I was in elementary school at that time, grades fourth, fifth, and sixth.  Success in drawing in these early years gave me enough confidence to continuing taking art classes in both junior and senior high school. In addition, both of my parents were very supportive of the interest I showed in drawing and they were never critical of my efforts. They continued to be so throughout my entire career.

In college I took courses in both painting and drawing that included a variety of subject areas such as still life, the portrait, and the human figure.  My professor was a realist in his approach to his own work and to his teaching methodology and has likewise influenced my own creativity. At this time I continued to prefer drawing to painting as color proved to be quite difficult. This was also my first experience in using oil as a painting medium.  Overall, these experiences generated a great excitement that propelled me forward to both create and to share this knowledge thru teaching. I received a B.A. degree in studio art and secondary education in 1975 and a Master of Fine Art degree in 1985, with my areas of concentration being painting and art history.

Over the years I have taught at various levels of education including high school, college, private art schools, and painting workshops. I also continued to pursue my endeavors as an artist and eventually decided to devote the majority of my time to that end. I have explored many drawing and painting media throughout my career. I invested over fifteen years painting mainly with oil paint while doing some limited exploration with watercolor. Presently, my main focus is on the use of watercolor as my major vehicle of artistic expression. It combines my love of drawing on paper with the transparent luminosity watercolor can achieve. This method incorporates the white of the unpainted paper as the lightest areas of the painting, while the middle and darkest areas consist of many layers of color to gain depth and color intensity.

My current work reveals my interest in reflective surfaces, especially water, along with artistic concerns for textures and local color. My paintings attempt to visualize the impact that light has on form in regards to weight, volume, value, texture and color. Light and shadow patterns are also used as a means of designing space-shape relationships in the compositional strategies employed in my formats. These elements combine together to hopefully create a mood and a sense of place for the viewer that the writer Joseph Campbell referred to as “aesthetic arrest.” The body of my mature work has been influenced by the painting methods of several artists as well as their philosophies involving creativity. Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and the Swedish painter Anders Zorn painted in both watercolor and oil with equal success. The artistic philosophies of both Andrew Wyeth and Robert Henri, whose book “The Art Spirit,” have contributed enormously to my evolution as an artist. I would also like to acknowledge my fellow contemporary artists and friends Stan Miller and Delbert Gish for their continued support and inspiration over all these years.