About me.

 

As long as I can remember I have been drawing; pens, pencils, crayons, markers and colored pencils in my youth to my current work with pastels, oil paints, and watercolor. All of these have at one time or another found their way to paper or canvas resulting in images of the things that that I have experienced, that have interested me and of the world that surrounds me.

 

My parents, and grandparents, but especially my Mother always encouraged me to develop my artistic skills. When I was growing up, I spent a great deal of time at the family dining room table drawing. I would often draw Disney characters and Peanuts characters for my Mother for her first or second grade classroom as aids in the teaching of her students. Other times I could be found drawing pictures of my favorite local athletes from the Boston Bruins or Red Sox. Other favorite subjects were drawing characters from my favorite comic books. As I got older, my artistic interests changed and were inspired by the many trips throughout New England and elsewhere in our country. All of these have helped to make me the artist I am today.

 

I basically consider myself “self learned”.  I prefer “self learned” as opposed to “self taught” because I believe I have learned and continue to learn, by trial and error, experimentation, practice, lots and lots of practice, reading books, magazines, through videos and DVDs, by visiting museums, galleries, entering exhibitions and talking to other artists. I have taken some classes, because, unless one is an artistic genius, you need some feedback on where you are going from time to time, and I am thankful to Phil Perkins and Ruth Hagstrom my original pastel teachers, and to Rob Farris (oils) and Carolyn Latanision (watercolors), with whom I currently study.

 

Many artists, and those in the art field, feel compelled to label each artist and their style of work. Realist, tonalist, colorist, these are some of the labels that others have assigned to me and to my artwork over the years; I myself at one time called my art representational expressionism. I no longer use that term to explain my art. My art is pretty self explanatory, created from the heart, inspired by my life’s experiences and thus, these days I accept no label other than: “Artist”

 

Art pulls at me. The need to create is at times insatiable. It is embedded and the need for it to explode from within is what drives me. When I create my art, I attempt to not just render the scene but to bring an emotion, a feeling, that touches the viewer and brings to them the same experience that compelled me to create the piece, and hopefully leaves them with their own attachment to that place or a place very much like it from within their own heart and memory.

 

I am a member of the Saugus High School Athletic Hall Of Fame with a degree in Business Administration from Salem State College and I have lived my entire life in Eastern Massachusetts.

 

I thank you for stopping by my site and hope that you will invite others to visit as well. I hope you like what you have seen, and that my art in some way has brought you peace, joy, and a place to lose yourself if only for a little while. Please visit again, drop me a line through my contact page and I hope to see you at an exhibit or demo one day.