My antecedents were mostly motion picture designers and professional artists. As a result, I had the benefit of being told, in no uncertain terms, how difficult creative work is.
I was apprenticed at Disney’s R&D facility–WED Enterprises while I attended Art Center College of Design. After a stint as a Disney Show Designer I started working independently and teaching (also at ACCD) in 1977. This went on with varying degrees of enjoyment until 2000, when I decided to dedicate my time and efforts to Painting and teaching.
I am currently refining my body of work, most of which is landscape-based, with a touch of the surreal and as much whimsy as I can get away with.
Influences include Gustave Courbet, George Inness Georgio Morandi and more recently Richard Diebenkorn My figurative work is influenced, to a degree, by Steve Huston, though I mostly paint the figure for fun, practice, or to teach.
Wayne Thiebaud has also been an influence; specifically, in his treatment of landscape as a cohesive collection of iconic formations, with his emphasis on critical study and "...a kind of long looking..." a phrase of his which I love and an approach that has been an integral part of this work.
My love of art history and contemporary painting, including abstract expressionism and the later works of artists such as Monet, Van Gogh, Sargent and Inness, encourages me and keeps the door open to even more abstracted works, paintings that interpret the forms found in nature that have always intrigued me.