Lava Flowers - Mount Etna, Sicily Painting

As an avid do-it-yourselfer - I grew up in a family of renovators and learned from an early age how to plaster, paint, do construction and use various hand and power tools for many tasks. My early interest in drawing and painting also incorporated the skills I had learned throughout my life and I evolved into a mixed-media artist. The idea that found objects could be added to oil and acrylic paintings has been a major theme of my work. Often, those objects are the basis for the work and lead to their eventual conclusion.