About the Artist

Art came to me early, without anyone around me, or even myself taking much notice. As a boy I carried home library books filled with photographs of fighter jets, bombers, and old biplanes, and spent hours sketching them, though I was otherwise not especially well behaved. In high school I chose art while all my male friends took shop. In the Autumn of 1972, leaving school, I got on a bus to Montpelier, Vermont, and ended up spending several years traveling around the country.

In July of that year I had found myself at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City; the Grateful Dead had just returned from Europe. That night opened doors of perception. Lying on the grass as Dark Star hazily drifted into Comes a Time—when the blind man takes your hand, says: don’t you see? — the ordinary dissolves into a lightness and harmony I couldn’t name, nor did I try to. It was the beginning of a search I have carried ever since, and is what I now try to express in making art.

For years afterward I lived like a vagabond, traveling from place to place, State to State, working mostly construction-type temp jobs, catching Dead shows when I could. As the song says, come on along or go alone, he’s come to take his children home. I took the latter option—going alone, but heading home nonetheless. Later I returned to school with the sole purpose of studying art, but life intervened. Children came, and with them the responsibility to raise and see to their needs. Eventually I went on to law school and another career, if you can call it that (in my case).

Aside from teaching art to my children quite a bit, only after they were grown did the inherent motivation to make art really return—or had been waiting all along. I have settled into working with pastels: portraits—often of Garcia, whose presence {and whose characteristically wily admonition: “Those of you who know Jesus, don’t turn Him in} even now to me embody both ineffable beauty and sorrow, and art itself—as well as landscapes, birds, flowers, animals and such, and figures marked by both suffering and resilience. Some works relate to grief, others to moments/scenes of quiet. enchantment. As the old song puts it, don’t give it up, you’ve got an empty cup—only love can fill”;  but more often: "I hear the cries of children and the other songs of war.…" Especially since October of 2023. In any case, that something essential, simple, and unspoken might reach across to another—is what I hope my work can be: not technically perfect, but increasingly meaningful glimpses of true reality. That’s the idea, anyhow. 

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