Collage Collage

My first experience in creating art was with gallons of household paint and our neighbors brand newly poured concrete porch as my canvas. I had no idea who Jackson Pollock was at the impressionable age of 6 but I did my best impersonation of his work all over that porch that my mother had to scrub clean by hand as I stood motionless on newspapers on the kitchen floor with my entire body and clothing covered in paint,(because rolling in paint was so much fun) and instructed by my shocked mother not to move until she finished the clean up hell. Coloring books of native American heros was not enough to contain my instincts for a large surface that screamed, "paint me." By 1983 I decided that doing something with my life besides wandering aimlessly might be a good idea to at occupy my immense creative urges so I decided to attend the University of Kansas and study theatre design because designing lights for the stage sounded cool and required not a single class in mathematics. As is turned out the subject matter and most instructors where much less than desirable. My love for the basic drawing classes with a host of incredible instructors in the art building was just the escape I needed from the structured, limited and wasteful nature of the theatre. By the time painting classes were able to be taken the emphasis was on abstract art, yes thank god finally my calling and reason for being alive hit me like a ton of baked bricks. Learning to build stretcher frames by hand instead of buying ready made store bought frames is a practice I still indulge in to this day. In 1987 escape from Kansas was essential so on to Boulder Colorado I went. Nature is my biggest influence and by having the mindset that naturally occurring environmental events took place over billions of years of evolution and all its glorious inspiration for creating works of art is endless and forever generously abundant. I have many pieces that have taken 10-15 years to create by searching, exploring, and honing a vision taking its time to evolve into a organic granite earth like appearance that demands extensive viewing adding long term value to peoples lives by enticing them to look at things differently with depth beyond the superficial. I was on an interview shortly after college and the hiring manager asked me what are my goals and I proudly and promptly answered, "I want to be the greatest painter in America.