About:
Born in California and graduated with degrees in Fine Art and Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara. For twenty years I lived in Ketchum, Idaho, where I discovered the Real West, the Rocky Mountains, the vast spaces and travelled extensively through Big Sky Country--- Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, to fully experience the vast lonely plains and grandeur, high peaks, rivers and lakes. In addition to oil painting, I trained Labrador retrievers, hunted birds, caught fish, rode horses, climbed mountains, kayaked rivers, skied, photographed rodeos and cowboys, and working ranches in the Stanley Basin in Central Idaho.
I lived on the East Coast for a few years and painted classic wooden sailboats and New York cityscapes. I started Roaring Mouse Entertainment to produce educational programing for children with digitally illustrated characters and settings. I returned to painting oil on canvas by creating a collection of Still Lifes in a traditional style, using religious and allegorical symbolism, adding whimsical objects to portray imagination and fantasy. I have also painted commissioned portraits and using bold colors to paint brilliant fish.
My newest paintings are a return to Western Art---cowboys, cattle, horses, rodeos and the harsh, lonely landscapes of the American West. The iconic cowboy as a symbol will always endure in our imagination and in life. The West represents strength, survival, resilience and independence, the best qualities in all of us.
“We simply need that wild country available to us… For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” ---Wallace Stegner
"You can see what man made from the seat of an automobile, but the best way to see what God made is from the back of a horse."---Charles M. Russell
My work is featured in various commercial collections, from the Hyannis Port Yacht Club in Massachusetts to Cosmopolitan Magazine headquarters in New York City in addition to private collectors. The photos below are of hiking with my dogs Teddy and Blue in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Thoughts on Epilepsy:
The mysterious workings of the brain confound neurologists, psychologists, philosophers, and those who experience seizures. Dealing with epilepsy has allowed me to see my life from a perspective, made me appreciate the beauty in life, and be grateful for every moment. Joan of Arc, Dostoyevsky, Vincent Van Gogh, all had Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. If seizures occur on the right side, it can produce bliss. If the seizures occur in a different part of the temporal lobe, which controls mood, memory, emotions, then you can have feelings of doom. The brain in “idle,” is actually far more active than the brain in conscious engagement. Washington University neuroscientist Marcus Raichle observed the resting brain and saw tremendous activity. The default mode network, as Raichle came to call it, is exploding with neurogenesis, crackling with interconnectivity, and burning perhaps 20 times the metabolic resources of the “conscious” brain. The brain’s resting-state circuitry (which is turned on, paradoxically, when you stop thinking) is thus very likely the best place to park a problem, for it employs the best, wisest, and most creative (though not necessarily fastest-working) mechanics.
Carl Jung believed there are two “brains” at work. The conscious brain cooks dinner, parks the car, lives in the daily chores. The other is the universal consciousness, the “parent” reprimanding the conscious self, the “child” self. The parent and the child. The parent we call God. The child is Man. The early-20th-century psychologist William James described personal moments of clarity, or "AH-HA!" moments in The Varieties of Religious Experience, as a snap-resolution of the “divided self.” It’s as if a whole lifetime’s worth of growth is compressed into a single instant as dense as a collapsed star. Seizures give a glimpse of the subconscious.
