I'm a nature/wildlife artist. I love to travel and enjoy reading, gardening and birdwatching; My taste in music runs to Mongolian rock and pop, 60's rock. pre-1940's jazz, afro-celt world music. I started my art career as a sign painter's apprentice in 1976 and earned a BFA in Illustration in 1989 from the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I've worked as a freelance sign painter/graphic designer, then graphic designer/illustrator. For the past twenty years I've focused on oil painting, but am now also going full circle back to the media I first fell in love with, pen and ink. I'm a member of the California Art Club, a Signature Member of Artists for Conservation and a Fellow of The Explorers Club. My work has appeared in a variety of prestigious national juried shows since 2003.
Spring has sprung so I’ve gotten out the past few days to paint and sketch in our garden. I use a Yarka full-pan set of paints, a variety of brushes and either a 9×12″ Arches cold press block or 8×8″ pieces of Sanders Waterford cold press taped to […]
I’ll have some paintings to show soon, but lately I’ve been mostly diving into dip pen and ink sketch studies, trying out various nibs I’ve been accumulating for the last year. I used dip pens for calligraphy and drawing back in the 1970s/1980s, but moved away from pen […]
I just finished the 2014 biography of James Abbott McNeil Whistler “A Life for Art’s Sake” by Daniel E. Sutherland and it was terrific! More than anyone else, Whistler freed art from moralizing, story-telling, narrative and historical subject matter and coined the term “Art for art’s sake” with […]
SketchWild is the new place to go for information, tutorials on sketching the natural world, including animals, in pen and ink and also watercolor. And sometimes both! Please click HERE to check it out and let me know what you’d like to learn about.I’ve been sketching on location […]
As I did last year, I’ve donated two pen and ink originals for the Explorers Club Annual Dinner auction. This year I decided to do birds that I’ve watched and photographed in Mongolia.I’ve seen little owls a number of times in a variety of locations…perched on a herder’s […]
Once upon a time (back in the mid 1970s), when I first had professional art aspirations, my first media was pen and ink, heavily influenced by medieval illumination and Alphonse Mucha. I used them for many years when I was a freelance graphic designer. In the early 1990s, […]
Before the end of the month I’ll be debuting a new website dedicated to sketching called “SketchWild”. It will include not only my field and travel sketching and painting, but also art supply reviews, tutorials and online classes.
