I have always loved wandering in wild places in nature. These places have been my greatest teachers.  I learned to be an artist while roaming the wooded hills of the Missouri Ozarks.  Meanwhile, I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  Then I lived in Kansas for a time, where I took as a subject the big sky and expansive contours of the tall grass prairie.  During this time I was progressively pursuing abstract ideas, but nothing could prepare me for the abstraction inherent in the landscape of northern New Mexico.  My visits to Taos transformed my work, and I moved here permanently in 1990 at the age of 30.  The baffling space and unbelievable color of the Taos landscape was like a smorgasbord for the senses for me after painting in the Midwest.

    Here where the high plains meet the sacred mountain, the canyons and the forests are alive with a powerful spirit of place.  It’s as if the unseen forces of nature, for lack of better words, are very close to the surface of things here.  The experience of it compelled me to find a language beyond representation to symbolize it.  The result was a series of watercolor abstractions, and then later some oils of a more purely expressionist flavor.  These have in common their flattened space and colorist sensibility, the former being a more intellectual approach and the latter a more directly emotional response.  The use of line is also an element during these periods, but always as a way of describing form.  I  then became interested in the possibilities of using line as line, independent of form to create an otherworldly kind of space.  Also I thought I would try working in the studio for a while, having worked mostly on location up to that point.  And so I started taking these automatic drawings, which have been happening for years, and putting them to canvas.  The Taos landscape is still in there, suggested by the horizon line that puts the other lines in context.

    Some of my favorite painters are Charles Burchfield, Mardsen Hartley, Arthur Dove, Henri Matisse, lately I’ve been looking hard at Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.  I have been particularly blessed to study and work with some outstanding world class senior painters.  I have painted regularly on location with Frank Stack, Keith Crown, Alyce Frank and David Barbero.  David Barbero also taught me the meditative martial art taichi, which for some of us is inseparable from art.  I currently am in my ninth year of taichi practice, and I teach taichi in Taos and Santa Fe.
    For information about regional and national shows I have been involved with, please feel free to request a resume.