About:
Graduated with degrees in Fine Art and Philosophy from UC Santa Barbara. I've painted in oil for fifty years. My first job was at Disneyland. I've always loved illustration and animation. All art is a type of illustration, the world perceived and expressed through the artist's eyes and imagination.
After college I moved to Ketchum, Idaho, where I discovered the grandeur of the West, the Rocky Mountains, the vast spaces. I traveled extensively through Big Sky Country -- Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, hiking the high peaks, camping by rivers and lakes. I hunted ducks and pheasants, trained Labrador retrievers, caught fish, rode horses, climbed mountains, kayaked rivers, skied, photographed rodeos, cowboys, and working ranches in the Stanley Basin in Central Idaho. The West represents strength, survival, resilience and independence, the best qualities in all of us. The iconic cowboy as a symbol will always endure in our imagination and in life. I lived on the East Coast for a time, and painted classic wooden sailboats and New York cityscapes, using the warm tones of the West. Back in California, I started a company called Roaring Mouse Entertainment to produce educational programming for children using digitally illustrated characters and settings.nAnother stage was Still Lifes, painted in a traditional style, using religious and allegorical symbolism, adding whimsical objects like toys to portray imagination and fantasy, wine and food, books, to illustrate a full life. Unable to travel during the pandemic. I painted commissioned portraits. I also wrote a series called The Awakening Sea, and created illustrations for it. I recently created a series of brilliant fish paintings, Red Snapper, as an expression of my love for the sea and marine life. I've been told each fish has a personality, an illustration of the life found in the Natural World.
"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.
