I have been making images for most of my life.
My earliest memories are of drawing and painting, and that impulse eventually led me to graphic design, photography, and a career spent thinking about how images work... how shape, line, color, composition and space can communicate something beyond themselves.
Painting has remained part of that life, sometimes quietly and sometimes at the forefront. Today it is at the center of my studio practice.
Landscape provides the starting point. The places I have lived and worked... from Louisiana and Texas to the High Plains, New England and now the coast of Maine... have shaped the way I see. I'm interested less in describing those landscapes than in discovering their underlying structure: divisions of land and sky, shifts in color and atmosphere, unexpected lines, shapes and relationships. From there, the paintings are free to move toward abstraction and become something of their own.
Photography is another part of that process. It gets me outside and looking closely again. Sometimes a photograph becomes a reference; more often the act of photographing simply reconnects me with the landscape... weather, light, distance, texture and those fleeting arrangements that make me stop and look.
For more than four decades, painting, drawing and photography developed alongside my career as a graphic designer and creative director, and later as a university design professor. I never really saw these as separate pursuits. Each influenced the way I approached the others, and all of them shaped the way I learned to see. A designer's instinct for structure, editing and composition doesn't disappear when the computer is replaced by a canvas and brush.
My work has been exhibited in solo, juried and university exhibitions, and my design work has received national and international recognition, including awards and publication by Graphis, Print and the New York Art Directors Show. I hold an MFA from Marywood University.
I now live and work in Maine, where painting has become my daily work. I'm continuing to explore landscape through abstraction while leaving room for experimentation, uncertainty and the possibility that a painting may end somewhere I didn't expect it to go.