ARTIST STATEMENT

My art brand is about visual structures that tell a story, either in nature or man-made.  My travels and places I have lived inspire my art if I am learning some historical, cultural, and geographical lesson. What fascinates me is the Pre Bauhaus buildings that still exist.  The Gothic buildings on college campuses, colonial American buildings all over the East Coast, and my love of mountains and nature-built structures such as caves. The art expression is with watercolor and then with a fine pen that isolate details, colors, and forms to help form a narrative.

BIOGRAPHY

My introduction to art was at the bucolic Stone Nursery School in Ann Arbor Michigan.  Although, it was my nursery school teacher who recognized my talent, it would take until much later for any interest on my part. Grade school art class consisted of rigorous and boring still-life drawings and color studies with crayon on paper. In hindsight I bless the long-suffering art teacher, Miss Morton at the Catholic grade school, for laying the foundation for strong rendering skills, understanding light and color that are essential to any artist. As an art teacher I realize how lucky I was to be forced into her rituals year after year. This was how the masters learned. Later, through the innovative directions of my high school art teachers, Gary Drake and Fritz Michaelis, I created work that attributed many awards and a scholarship through Scholastic Art Awards. I eventually decided to matriculate at the University of Michigan STAMPS School of Art. The outstanding professors provided a rigor and expectation, which prepared me for the high percentage of perspiration necessary in art creation.  
             My interests were many with graphic design, printmaking, fabric design, weaving and a lot of life drawing. I never wanted to be a graphic designer. But I was good at it; it paid the bills and let me live in NYC, Boston, Austin and Chicago.  Even so, I still pursued my fine art through studies at the Art Student League of New York with Mario Cooper, Solar-plate printmaking with Katherine Brimberry at FLATBED Gallery and Press in Austin, Texas, Portrait Studies with Marilyn Propp and oil painting with David Gista at the Evanston Art Center, Evanston IL and watercolor painting with Irving Shapiro, American Academy of Art and Pomona Hollenbeck at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.     
              Primarily, the painter Tom Christopher has influences my work.  His use of light and expert use of a brush stroke make for extraordinary work. In addition to Tom, Lucien Freud, Winslow Homer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and John Singer Sargent provide illumination with their work. I currently share what I have learned in life and art as a high school art teacher at North Chicago Community High School.