When I was a teenager, my father gave me his 35mm camera, and I began wandering around taking pictures of stuff I found. My professional photographer friends thought the images had artistic merit, encouraging me to further my art. In the early 1980s I tried making paintings of the photos using gouache and illustration board, unaware of the difficulties of the gouache medium. 

Those early works, while successful (I even made a sale), were put on hold while other life events intervened. In the mid-1990s I began painting again, this time in acrylic on canvas. My impetus was to recreate the early painting that I had sold, and always regretted doing so. I have been painting steadily ever since.

My subject matter is derived mostly from photographs I have taken over the past 40 years. Places include Southern California, where I live, and places I have visited in my travels, from Montana to Mexico and Europe.  

Over the years I have come to see my paintings as documents of things looked at but not seen, the ordinary environment that we live in but seldom examine closely. I believe that by close observation, which is necessary to translate source photographs to canvas, I can begin to uncover the grace that is hidden in the things around us. The paintings are my way of bearing witness, and of making people stop what they’re doing and pay attention, to something they may have never seen before, but that makes them feel “I know this.” A young woman saw my work on display remarked, “You make ordinary things look beautiful.” Yes, that is what I am after, the beauty in ordinary things that reveals itself if we only see.

I am a self-taught artist. I live and work in Costa Mesa, CA.