I was born in California and lived there until I was 11 years old. At that time my father, a Washingtonian, arranged for a transfer and moved our family to the small Washington lumber town of Longview. I lived there through my high school years. I guess I had big city in my blood because I was inexorably drawn to Seattle, where I lived for 30 years. For a variety of reasons I moved back to Longview in 2003.

As a child I showed a natural inclination for creativity. I remember loving to draw before I was school age. I would spend hours sitting with crayons, clay and anything else I could make things with. For years I wanted to be a realist, and followed that course. By the time I attended art school I was looking for ways to “loosen up”, to have less control of my process. In those years I was introduced to the Dada and Surrealist movements in art history. I was intrigued by the way this group of artists, writers and musicians experimented in various methods of tapping into the unconscious to create a separate reality. These artists were classically trained, so there techniques and handling of materials were very solid. They were consciously breaking the rules they had learned. Intent and content became the real issues. It was their ability to create dream-like imagery that separated their work from centuries of predominantly realist genre. Artists that most influenced my work are Giorgio de Chirico (who in my estimation is the father of surrealism), Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Dorthea Tanning, Salvador Dali and Roberto Matta.

 My images are metaphorical in nature, juxtaposing the recognizable with the improbable. The images come not from the world around me, but rather from within. They tend to flow onto the substrate. For the most part the images tend to create themselves without a conscious beginning or end. I still enjoy rendering with a classical style with regards to light on surface, perspective and such, but the subject matter takes on a life of its own.

 I sometimes describe my style using a road trip analogy. We commonly plan our trips. We know where we are going, what route we will take to get there and how long it should take. However, one can take a journey with no map or planned destination. One will always wind up somewhere, and quite often discover interesting things along the way.