Artist Statement
A painter is bound by light.
Paintings that are grounded in aesthetics are universally compelling and paintings that reach further than aesthetics risk opening the deeper aspects of our psychology, These are the exercises where I like to play.
I believe art is primarily a spiritual force and secondarily a material force.
I want to make art that the common man can access. It’s a great reward when I intend humor in my statement and I get a chuckle.
I am empathetic to the feelings of my fellow humans but I believe provocation is an important mechanism in art.
Irony has followed me throughout life and it is fascinating. What has remained a consistent experience since childhood is the innate joy of creating something with my hands. This is a driving force to continue with creation, whether it is a soothing therapeutic or a benign addiction. This pulse connects me to the arc of my life. Everything else that is derived from making my art is a bonus.
Freedom, Love, God, and Art, are semantic mysteries that can be cultivated but not captured.
BIO
ADOLESCENCE
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in California and am a stalwart baby boomer. The influence of modern media and television is undeniable.
Two influences permeated me at an early age. I was raised a Catholic, so I recall spending endless hours at mass on Sundays seeking salvation from boredom instead of hell. Salvation was found in browsing the ecclesiastical, well-rendered, and composed, figurative art on the ceilings and walls of churches.
It is only recently that I have realized that aside from all the negativities associated now with the Roman Catholic church one silver lining is that the Catholics kept visual art alive in the West through the centuries. I became fascinated with the paintings of Michelangelo and DaVinci.
Outside of the church and at homeside the cult of the television cartoon took firm grasp upon me. The Disney studio was like God to me in my youth. They did no wrong. It was already back then the quintessential escape mechanism from the doldrums of farm life in Central California where I grew up.
It was no surprise to be engaged in this media as Walt Disney actively sought out the best animators and artists in the world to create his film and TV production. The humor and satire of the Warner Brothers Studios was a respite from the altruism of Disney but it was actually the Jay Ward Studio productions of the Bullwinkle series where I found my comfort, laughs, and inspiration above and beyond all.
Not much later I discovered Mad Magazine published out of New York and its great Illustrator, Mort Drucker. I feel an influence from the American artist, Norman Rockwell who is a genius at expressing a simple idea in a rich and detailed painting motif. As I see it, William Turner turned Western painting from traditional representational art into a visual language that validated the impressionistic and abstract forms that were later to come.
LOS ANGELES
But for me as a youth, motion picture was the medium that most captivated me and gave me the greatest artistic revelations. And I was lucky enough to receive a California State Federation Scholarship in 1972 to the University of California in Los Angeles. This gave me my first chance to venture from our family farm.
In truth, I have never stopped traveling and venturing from that day on. Not long after this relocation, I ended up studying animated film in the UCLA animation workshop under the guidance of the closest thing to a mentor I ever had in my life, professor Dan McClaughlin Jr. Looking back at the 70s with the political unrest in the USA regarding Vietnam, civil rights, and the counter-culture movement, this time spent writing and drawing cell animation film shorts grounded me and kept me sane.
After graduation, the dream of making films in Los Angeles was met with the reality of supporting myself financially in that difficult profession and city. These were the most difficult years of my life. I did not feel like my career was on track and I was dissatisfied that my ambitions in film production were in the control of motion picture unions that limited my self-expression. I needed to be the auteur of my own work. I did not fit in and I returned to my inherent talent of painting and graphics to earn some money. There were some small victories during this period, such as having a comic strip published in the LA Weekly, and one of my short cartoons distributed. Still, my Wanderlust in my youth dominated my desires and Wanderlust is a German word that brought me to my next chapter.
SWITZERLAND
Eventually, my social and networking skills helped me gain an opportunity to travel abroad and work in Switzerland on a mural commission in 1986. This was an important development in my life. I grew to feel more at home in the European environment and the next 12 years were probably the best in my life as far as discovery and inspiration.
Coming from a rural background, adapting to a rural mountain village in the Berner Oberland was not difficult, I saw an opportunity to create images in the environment I lived in that were original perspectives from a West Coast American that no one had done before. I was inspired to create work on the European continent that held our traditions in Western art. After two years I was earning a reasonable income with my art for the first time, and painted commissions in Switzerland, Holland, France, Germany, Australia, and later Scotland. Doors that led to rich experiences were opened up for me.
True to my own nature, my art stayed narrative in Europe, but for the first 12 years, I concentrated on a type of “pop surrealism” where I could demonstrate my fantasies. I am a big fan of René Magritte from Belgium. I love social and political humor and satire in all forms of art, and many of my paintings reveal this affinity.
Alongside surrealism I created many landscape paintings as the beauty of the Alps compelled me to this genre. Although I rarely produce abstract art per se, I painted and produced a form of postmodern art in the last 30 years where I often try to make a specific social statement.
In 2014 I received a European Union passport through my heritage in the Azores Islands and I am now a full-fledged US immigrant who foresees living out my life and producing art in Central Europe.
My current home is on the Vierwaldstattersee outside of Luzern in Meggen.