who i am
I am a self taught artist working primarily with paint. I have been painting since 1985 when I decided I needed an outlet for my creative instincts that wasn’t being met through my other work. Painting became the place where I could explore my imagination and release images that yearned to come out from my emotions, my unconscious, my experience of reality, my love of nature. Images flow that I do not always understand but I let them loose because the act of painting takes me to those places. I start with an image and the process of painting will sometimes end with the image originally seen and other times with something entirely different. I trust the process to take me wherever my muse wants. I try not to intellectualize my work. I want it to be an expression of my soul.
My work is often narrative and representational but I also paint abstracts. Many of my works tell a story, especially the larger ones. I use vibrant color to make images jump and create depth, and light and dark to help frame them. My compositions can be very detailed or quite simple. My subjects range from figures of people or animals, sometimes as portraits and others as figures in a landscape, to pure landscape and stilllife. The overall images also range from the serious to the humorous and from reality to loose representation and further to the abstract. I often work with themes. Fish, bears, corvids, portraits, cities, northwest landscapes, flags, fruit, sports figures, are all recurrent themes. Some subjects are one of a kind, not part of a theme. Look through my website gallery and explore my work. You will find some you like.
