Wood Duck Painting

I am originally from Southern Ontario, but my life path has led me across North America and provided me with opportunities to settle in or experience a number of unique environments along the way. I am most often inspired by my love of the horse and the landscape surrounding it. As a child, growing up in the sixties, I was exposed to the equine art of the late great artist Orren Mixer and many other great western artists, through the art features in the Western Horseman magazine. I was so enamoured with the detail and technique of Mixer’s works I was drawn to dabble in equine and western art at an early age. Once bit by the art bug I branched off into other mediums and subjects. I have lived on a horse ranch in Alberta for many years now and this has offered me a unique knowledge of my domestic, wild and landscape subjects. In 2012 I was selected to receive the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. In the past few years I have been given the opportunity to design book covers and to illustrate a children's book. When I was attending art shows I was selected by jury to the Calgary Stampede Western Art Auction, the Medicine River Art Show, Ponoka Stampede and several others but my other work obligations limit my availability for travelling. To date, most of my original art is sold directly from my studio and my pieces are featured in private and corporate collections throughout North America and Europe. Constantly inspired by a love of the natural world, wildlife and horses in particular I love to draw upon western history, legends, spirituality, imagination and life experiences to compose inimitable life-scapes of the past, present and future. In my work I hope that you can see the wind caressing the prairie grasses, or gently lifting and playing with the hairs of a paint horse’s tail. My art has taken me to explore all sorts of mediums; melding bone, stone and feather to flesh out the vision or painting ordinary elements in a way that they really aren’t so ordinary. I hope that my work shares with you my love of the earth, the animals that we share it with and the unique ways we can look at everything. I hope that it helps you see that we are all related.