About the artist

As far back as I can remember, I have been scribbling, drawing, making marks, on something with something else.

I scribbled on the kitchen floor as a toddler, inside my desk, on the chalk board, in the dirt as a school kid. I made drawings on paper, paintings on burlap and Masonite and cardboard as a teenager. I practiced diligently, working from photos of classical sculpture and copying Rembrandt.

In college, I continued to refine my drawing skills and learned to stretch a canvas, prime it and paint “fat over lean”. I worked in the classroom with still life and from the model and outside in the landscape near Bozeman, was taught to carry a sketchbook everywhere and draw, draw, draw. I studied scene design and painting and worked summer stock theater.

In 1964 I rode the Greyhound bus to New York for a job at the World’s Fair and spent all my free time at the museums seeing original works, not photos.

At the San Francisco Art Institute, I felt completely out-classed by the more sophisticated and knowledgeable students. Finally I quit school and just explored the city with a couple of other “ex-pat” Montanans. And it was a happenin’ scene, man. My sketchbooks are full of coffee house drawings, musicians, friends, and psychedelic doodles. When the city became noisy and tiresome and too full of everything, I came back to Montana, eventually settling in Basin where I have lived now for over forty years.

Here I built a small house, a studio, and worked, mostly in sloitude, painting, drawing, printmaking. I took some classes at the Archy Bray Foundation and made some sculptural vessels.

The Montana Artist’s Refuge brought new life to the arts in Basin and I benefited greatly from my contact with those artists who came to work and play from all over the world. I became good friends with some of these artists and have traveled as far as New York and Cape Town, South Africa, to be with them again.

Sometime in the late 90’s I became entranced with water. On a camping trip to Cataract Creek I saw the water as if for the first time. I sat for hours on the banks of the Boulder River, the Jefferson, on Basin Creek, on the Missouri in my canoe, often just watching, sometimes painting. Back in the studio, I’d reimagine the water and paint the flow, the rise and fall, the depth, the reflection, examining the endless variations.

In the winter of 2006-7 I went to the sea. I found a place on the Oregon coast where I could live and paint the ocean. I returned there every year for periods of one to five months.

The past three years I have stayed in Basin experiencing deep winter and painting to the music of J.S. Bach. In September of 2018 I traveled with friends to San Francisco to here YoYo Ma play the Back cello suites in Berkeley. I continue to paint with Bach. I will have a show of the Bach paintings in early 2020 at the Emily Free Gallery in Helena.