Water Works #19 Print

Creating art has always been a means for me to express things that spoken language cannot touch, or perhaps only begins to reveal… Although I first began painting & drawing when I was only 4 years old, my work has continued to evolve over the last 53 years as I perfect processes & skills and strive to build upon and surpass prior endeavors. Every project is an ongoing journey or quest from the familiar to the brink of something new and even more magnificent. My professional artistic career began about 35 years ago in 1979, with several large-scale public art projects for the City and County of Milwaukee. I have predominantly been working in large-scale impressionistic realism but have also worked in the abstract/ color-field painting as well as B&W and color photography since the mid 1970’s. [I studied under landscape artist, William Nichols, watercolor artist, Laurence Rathsack, and photographer, Steven Foster, at UWM in the late 1970’s. Since 1996 I have also been working with kiln formed glass – mostly self taught.] My sources of inspiration have long been water, nature, botanical forms, light, atmosphere, sometimes figurative subjects or animal life and poetry. Although my interests and influences are broad and diverse, there are underlying connections to seemingly unrelated subjects, just as there often are in the natural world…. The immersive underwater series - a long time evolving water project - was inspired by a daily swimming ritual I developed in college. I would often swim until I had achieved the effortless sensation of dissolving into the water. As I swam, it would also appear that other swimmers were also liquefying into water, bending and stretching with the watery waves as the light waves are refracted through medium of water. From the nature based external world to the personal, subjective, emotive, internal world, imagery often becomes metaphorical – always open to interpretation by the viewer.