Biography Lite
I was born in Wichita Kansas, and grew up drawing, coloring and painting my way through childhood and adolescence in Odessa, Midland and Houston, Texas. In my second year at the University of Houston, the Vietnam Era raised its ugly head and I was invited to participate. I dodged into the Navy, and served in San Diego, Charleston, Pensacola, Bremerhaven Germany and Philadelphia,
skipping Southeast Asia and all seven seas entirely.
After the Navy I lived in Houston, Atlanta, and Columbus, Ohio building a career as an advertising art director, and creative director. I worked for a number of retail and advertising firms including, for a dozen years, my own.
Success proving burdensome, the family being raised and dispersed, the pets having departed and the 20th century receding into the past, I took some refresher courses and put myself to work as a painter.
The rest is a work in progress.
Artist Statement
For the first several years of my painting career I made graphic, cubist-influenced paintings of social and political themes using acrylic paint on canvas, often collaging objects that reinforced the themes.
In 2015 I started experimenting with thick, matte, single colors of paint brushed in deep unruly whorls and textures over masked glossy sprayed metallic paint; unmasking removes some of the thick textures and reveals orderly metallic shapes. Thinking abstractly about removal and metal led me to name the paintings after working mines, The metallic color relates (roughly) to the ore being mined.
I realized the stretched canvas panels I was using were too textured and bouncy for what I was doing so I began using Gessobord, a pre-primed, smooth, cradled wood panel.
After a 2018 trip to Hawaii, I painted a series of pieces named after volcanos, On some, but not all of the pieces the layering is reversed…smooth matte backgrounds and unruly glossy metallic whorls and textures on top.
In 2019 I moved from a dense, city neighborhood to a remote, rural location and built a free-standing studio from the ground up…finishing just in time for the pandemic shutdown in March of 2020.
Lately, I’ve been painting on unprimed wood panels, letting the grain of the wood interact with and/or frame the paints and collage elements. I’m intrigued to see the support layer of a piece do more than keep the paint off the wall.
I’m intending much more to come.