I was born in Los Angeles where I live now, and my last year
of college was at CSU Humboldt, in 1973, where I took almost
all art classes. I studied photography and felt I had found
my medium that recorded in the process of mixing images, new
images unique to experimentation and process that seemed to
link the undercurrent sensibility and visual expression of
the image. I considered myself self-taught and I worked on
my own, combining pictures and creating images unique to my
individual sensibility, but took classes and was inspired
by the work of teachers like Edmund Teske, a creative photographer
whose collection of work is now at the Getty Museum.
Times
changed and I moved into the great outdoors of the Santa Monica
Mountains doing plein air watercolors. The French Impressionists
were an inspiration, painting the colors they saw in the same scenes
at different times of day in different light. Painting in the "open
air" the rhythms and colors of land flow and light changes of the
sea or landscape, I focus what I feel about how it is where I am.
I painted in workshops with Don Blaisdell in Santa Monica Mountain
sites for seven years and later taught my own classes. My art journey
has been an exploration of those who came before and with me on
the same path. It has been an enriching experience seeing
the work, techniques, and learning the lives and experiences of
these artists.
My inspiration has always been in what is around me in the shape,
form, and colors of nature, and the random markings of the world.
I paint oils loose like watercolors, spontaneously splattering,
dripping, and mixing different mediums, and while always composing
the space, I try not to impose too much thinking in the action of
painting. I scratch and drip and rub to uncover and cover color over
color. Materials are the tools of my expression and elements
integrate in a structural balance creating a statement of color
and form. I translate the visual ideas in my head to whatever they
become on canvas. I am not in control of the end result as one color
bleeds into another creating a new color and design I hadn't anticipated
or thought out. I have always as an artist followed my own self
sense of creativity as a natural, inner sense that grows with creative
exposure.
