About the artist

Raised on a working ranch in Northern California, I earned three degrees in the natural sciences and went on to a 30-year career managing parks and historic sites, including serving as chief of operations of California State Parks, and director of Alaska State Parks. A serious student of art all my life, I have presented successful solo and group shows of my paintings and sculpture, with pieces now in more than fifty private and public collections. 

Artist's Statement

Art has been my lifelong pal, traveling companion, damn good friend, really. But … we fight a lot.  We fight over ideas, light, media, realism, abstraction, interpreting nature’s beauty, mourning its loss. At times we nearly come to blows over ego, rejection, joy, and the almost constant nagging that what we do together is never good enough. Then appears the next art idea, its red eyes glowing in the cool dark around the embers of a campfire. Is it out of reach? I chase it with a club till it surrenders in my studio.
 
Paint, sculpted wood, even fabric, help sustain me through the gray, rainy Northwest winters. I’m always on the hunt for the art idea – driven by it, really. Often the idea becomes a vision, a plan, then a passion. My belief is that artists should seek to create a masterpiece, nothing less.  
 
Think art that shouts – or whispers, “Nature!”  A cormorant dives through a flash of sunlight on the ocean surface. A Peregrine Falcon stoops at 200 mph. Yellow moonlight glints through greenery along a Yukon creek.
 
A Robinson Jeffers quote in my studio could serve my artist’s statement:: Mountains and ocean, rock, water, and beasts and trees are the protagonists, the human people are only symbolic interpreters.

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