About the artist

Every Canvas Tells a Story

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After earning a BFA in painting and photography, then an AM and doctoral candidacy in Film Studies from the University of Michigan, I moved myself West and have now crisscrossed the Bay Area, Southern and Northern California coasts, and the Central Valley countless times and have been in love with this boundless topography for over 40 years. The undulating farmland, the incessant movement along the shoreline, the mountainsides that are both rocky and verdant, all yield a serenity, a sense of having arrived at a place I was always intended to be.

My work now grows out of the traditions of Post‑Impressionism, California Impressionistic Realism, and American Regionalism, but it lives firmly in the contemporary West — specifically, Northern California. As a transplanted Midwesterner, I'm drawn to the same questions of light, form, and atmosphere that animated Cézanne and the early California landscape painters, while organizing fields, rivers, and oceanside skies into clear planes of color and shifting weather.

I spent seven years within the Hollywood film industry, until my journey progressed from parenting at home, to teaching high school English, Art, film studies, and photography. I now dwell in a return to that Midwestern beginning of canvas and camera — able to share my work full time, and more importantly, hoping for a chance to participate in some small way in the preservation, conservation, and regeneration of our land.

As I borrow the camera’s way of framing the world, then use paint to slow time and deepen color, I invite a more contemplative encounter with these ordinary but charged places.

I work to create the kind of image that subtly changes the way you inhabit your space. With a sense of calm and connection, your mornings feel a little lighter. Evenings feel more grounded. A painting becomes a quiet companion in the room — a reminder that beyond the screens and schedules, there is always sky, land, and water waiting just outside the frame.

There’s a quiet documentary undercurrent here. In each painting you'll strongly sense being embedded within a tangible place. But you'll also sense the implied politics of land use, and the daily toil of humanity in the built environment, even when the painting remains lyrical. For a fleeting moment you might even be convinced you've smelled the life within the humus.

Ordinary American life resides in these paintings, observed without sentimental kitsch, without romantic ruin, but attentive witnessing.

To create is both to listen to, and to fully, attentively see the world, its stillness, and to move within its spaces and capture them. I invite you to explore these special places with me.

I create oil-on-canvas works rendered with knife and brush in order to offer viewers more than just a glimpse — I want them to step into the frame, to feel the energy, the silence, and the pulse of the moment as I did when capturing it. I want my collectors to experience art that connects them to the beauty of existence. To find home.

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...from camera to knife and brush on canvas

THE PROCESS

Every Stroke of Color Begins With a Vision

From the captured photo reference to a canvas, each painting is a journey of layering colors, blending textures, and shaping emotions into form. It’s never just about paint — it’s about creating an experience. Every piece is crafted to spark connection, offering you, the collector, a chance to pause, feel, and bring that same sense of wonder into your own space.

My love for the landscape, the light, and the process of painting itself is a central passion. This joy isn't just from creating art—it’s from the deep, ongoing relationship with my surroundings and my interpretation of them.

Imaginings of a universal unity have been everywhere recently, from acknowledging the insights of philosophers throughout millennia to the mind-twisting speculations of quantum physics. It's “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” in a recent movie title. It's Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist notions of nonduality, arrived at intuitively through observation and meditation. It's the Transcendental notions of Walt Whitman’s Float, onward to the counter-intuitive revelations of macro- and micro-physics that suggest our solid world might not even exist at all as we assume to understand it, but rather as energy fields entangled throughout the cosmos — all of it wrapped up in what we have always termed “Nature.”

Our universal yearning to be part of the natural world just might be an expression of the undeniable fact that we — everyone and everything — are stardust, made of the same elemental stuff.

I want all that — for myself and for anyone spending time with my art. To feel, as Michael DeGrasse Tyson put it, that "It’s not just that we’re alive in the universe. It’s that the universe is alive within us. And that discovery borders on the spiritual."