"Downhill Racer" Painting

Much of my work (including many of my drawings and sculptures as well as my paintings) can be viewed at my website.

In the past I was represented by the Z-Wolf Gallery in Denver, Colorado and The Boulder Art Gallery in Boulder, Colorado as well as galleries in Tucson, Arizona and Brentwood, California. I spent five years painting under the watchful eyes of Jean Packard, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, two summers at the Charles Cecil Art Studio in Florence, Italy, and several years at the Boulder Art Academy in Boulder, Colorado. I also trained in sculpting under Valentin Okorokov, an accomplished Russian trained painter and sculptor. During my two summers with Charles Cecil, I concentrated on the figure and portraiture using the “sight-size” method made popular by John Singer Sargent and before him Titian, Van Dyck and Velazquez. In the Boulder Art Academy, we focused on the art of anatomy and the anatomy of art.

I have been painting since 1986. My early paintings (1986 - 2013) can best be described as expressionistic and/or surreal portraiture/figure, often larger than life. Most are from live models and from my sculptures. See for example Lindsay in Reds and Blues and The Music Student at my website. Others come from my imagination as exemplified by The Chess Queen. My objective was to elicit an emotional response through composition, color, shapes, and the application of paint, while at the same time retaining the correct anatomy, either realistically or through purposeful exaggeration. In the latter part of that earlier period, I pushed the envelope by combining abstraction with these real and surreal approaches to the figure in order to create a synergistic result as exemplified by The Sisters of Baghdad. Many of my ideas came from my drawings (virtually thousands of them) which were created out of my head on almost a daily basis. The Cross Dresser is one such painting.

In 2013 I put the paint brushes and sculpting tools aside and began writing fiction, first poetry then novels, screenplays, and stage plays. Six of my novels have been published along with two of my stage plays.

In 2020 I began painting again. This time I turned to color and shapes rather than portraiture and figure. My paint is applied in thick layers exaggerated even more so by multiple layers of glue serving as an underpainting. The glue not only adds thickness to the paint (impasto) but also runs in ways that produce unique shapes which take on lives of their own.