Café Louis Philippe at Dusk II Painting

I have spent many years of my art career involved in the creation and production of commercial art. Throughout those successful, creative and ground breaking professional endeavors, I continued to pursue my personal, creative vision, including adding to my accomplishments a Masters of Fine Art degree in painting from The American University in Washington, DC, while producing artwork for a number of private collections. Today, my work incorporates the lessons of my fine art training with the disciplines of the commercial art world. I'm painting images as a way to stop time, to really see and experience that image (a place, a person, a scene) at that moment in time, and to feel what the light and shadow, created by its existence, has to say or to ask. I look for images that ask me questions about existence, loneliness, beauty in the face of chaos, and that add color to life. Working from one or more photographs and sketches, I draw and redraw the image, sometimes on fields of one or more tinted ground colors that define mood or underlying spatial relationships in the composition. Incrementally, I build the composition with layers of colors to a final defining of the light and shadow, that envelop the objects in the painting. Perhaps it’s my raison d'être is to create in all things that I do. Painting is a way to create a visual statement about my orientation to seeing, feeling, and existing. It is an opportunity to share the results of what I create in a painting with others, that can bridge the singularity of existing, invite others in, and allow them to have their own experience with these images that may ask the unanswerable, but are engaging nonetheless. My work is in over forty private and corporate collections.