"Before You Were Born" Drawing

I grew up in the small town of Sumter, South Carolina, where the towering, Spanish-moss hung oaks lined the streets of the old part of town. Everywhere I looked there was beauty and history, and that history was both rich and tragic. But high and low, the cotton fields, the deeply shaded woods and swamps, they were in my blood and my young mind was endlessly inspired by them. The visual evolution of this place called Sumter--the subdivisions gobbled up the cotton fields, the sprawling development, the loss of habitat--was a force that was unleashed during my childhood and youth, and ever since--as I witnessed this in such a brief span of years--I have felt an urgency about capturing the endangered world in my art. I see a camellia in bloom and I want to capture it, either in photo or a painting. I meet an interesting character and I start weaving them into a story. This sense of history and loss, beauty and destruction, has fueled my art; it is the drive behind my work as a painter, a writer and a filmmaker.

In high school, I was extremely fortunate to be a student of a French teacher, Madame Ali, who devoted an entire semester to the exploration, in French, of the masters of French painting. Her love of Manet, Degas, Matisse and Bonnard affected me deeply and inspired me to draw and paint. At the University of Georgia, Dr. Joseph Stell, the head of the theatre design department,
appreciated my ability to draw and encouraged me to pursue scene design. Under his tutelage I learned the concepts of perspective and visual locus, which have been invaluable to me as both an artist and a film director.

My paintings and drawings hang in private collections in Los Angeles, Denver, New York, Athens, GA, Winston Salem, NC, and Atlanta.

My film bio can be viewed on IMDB.