You Sure Do Shine Painting

EDUCATION Creative work has always been the foundation of my life. In college I had six years of extensive training in drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history, and graduated with a B.S. Degree in Design. My career in retail design was very fulfilling, working worldwide in architecture and design, and over all these years I have always painted and made sculptures. I have presented figurative and abstract work in varying venues including competitions and private galleries throughout my life. DISABILITY In the late 1990’s, I developed an Essential Tremor (ET). ET is a genetically inherited progressive neurological disorder, causing considerable shaking, primarily in my hands. Even with medication, the tremor reduces my ability to use small motor skills, limiting my ability to draw freehand. Faced with ever declining control of line making skills, I chose to refocus my art away from figurative work, to primarily abstract painting and sculpture. ME I have always been a very structured person; military school, pre-med, then architecture and design. I prefer compositions that are geometric, rectilinear, symmetrical and controlled. I work to minimize my compositions with forms that embrace regimentation while employing a wide variety of sculptural and paint materials, application techniques and finished surfaces. In the late 1990's, I developed an Essential Tremor (ET). ET is a genetically inherited defect, causing uncontrollable shaking, primarily in my hands. This tremor reduces my ability to use small motor skills, limiting my ability to draw lines or tightly control images. Faced with ever declining control of line making skills, I chose to refocus my art work on non-objective abstract painting, rather than giving up painting entirely. Just as my life (and yours) is about things I can control and things I can't, I have refocused my art making on the visual conflicts of randomness and control. What at first seemed like a creative liability has become the focus of my work and my strongest asset. In the past three years, I have begun again as an emerging artist, developing a new body of work based on new processes, using new tools and materials and finding evolving outcomes with a unique voice. This work is process based and experimental in nature, based on a "learn as you go" method with little reliance on academic training or instruction. My paintings take two forms.