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 I've been painting since I was ten years old, after receiving an oil painting set from my dad that Christmas in 1957. I began using watercolor to make color notations on pencil sketches to later use as reference for oil paintings back at my studio (my bedroom). As I became more comfortable with watercolor, began to do watercolors on location for their own sake. I love to be in front of my subject painting it. I love majestic places, National Parks and natural settings. After being raised and educated in New Jersey, graduating from the Newark School of Fine & Industrial Art in 1968, I moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1975, with the goal of painting the southwest. The desert and canyons of Arizona, and the stark difference between the east coast and the Pacific west coast were striking. Back east, everything was green. Red was a perfect complementry color there, such as a red barn in a landscape. Out west it was just the opposite. Red rock was the dominant color, which made green, such as sage brush, the complementry color. I was in love with this landscape and still am. I was using pinks and purples which were never used in New Jersey. Also, in the desert the paper dried so quickly. I remember on a painting trip to Maine's coast in 1971, when I waited for over an hour for the paper to dry because I was painting in a fog bank. Patience and knowing when to quit are the two hardest things to learn in watercolor. Patience, because "time", as in no other medium, is critical. If you apply the paint to a wet area too soon, it will bleed too much. Too late and you have a hard edge. And knowing when to quit is critical also. If you over work a watercolor, it looks busy, and there is no way to paint over it!
Over the past 40 years I have made some 30 watercolor trips all over the country and painted in all 4 corners of the United States, from Maine to Key West Flordia, and Washington State down to Southern California desert and of course, Arizona. To me a "watercolor trip" is a working vacation, a camping trip with the sole purpose of painting watercolors. Other trips were geared to marketing my work to galleries. I frame all my own work, and would travel to Scottsdale and Santa Fe with a load of paintings to place and rotate periodically. In 2003, I spent 3 weeks painting in the 4 corners region and returned again in 2006, in preparation for a one man show in Spring of 2007 at the Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Georgia. Many of the pieces on this site are from those two trips.
I also taught Color & Design, Illustration, and Computer Graphics at Bauder College from 1996 to 2006.
I have recently come upon a collection of my paintings from my parents, and also a gallery that has had many of my watercolors in a flat bin since 1981, unframed and out of sight, except for the persistent shopper they have never been seen. Getting these paintings back is actually a nice surprise. It is like opening up a time capsule for me seeing these pieces once again, and I have been placing them here for sale. I have also tried my best to date the old pieces. Now my web site here is more of a retrospective of my work over many years.
One last bit: I have decided to sell my work online unframed. It makes it so much easier to ship and you the customer can "customize" the frame to where it will hang. It just makes sense. |
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