I began my artistic journey as an undergraduate at St. Cloud State University in the 1970’s where I graduated with a BFA in art and a minor in Aviation. That was when I began to learn and experience what it meant to be an artist and how I could articulate my life experiences artistically. My art is my avenue to express my memories, feelings, and experiences. When you look at my art, it is my hope that you will see the feelings and emotions that flood through me as the brush touches canvas.
I continue to travel the world carrying a sketch book with me recording daily events that touch me. Since traveling with oil paints is difficult in today’s world, I record in ink my thoughts, views, and emotions. Upon returning home, I’ll paint the emotions from landscapes letting my passion for the world’s beauty exude onto the canvas. My goal as an artist is to portray that moment and emotion that I felt bond me to the terrain, in such a way that it elicits a similar emotional connection from the viewer as well.
In the past I was on a mission to record nature before the bulldozers arrived and transformed the pristine landscape saturated with abundant wildlife and vegetation, to sites of residential and commercial real estate. Since many of the recent events of the world have affected most of the population as a whole, I've narrowed my goals to an even more personal level by recording the events and emotions directly related to my purpose and greatest happiness in this world…my family. Each day brings growth and understanding to daily events in my life's journey and I feel that I've just begun to see a new body of work dealing with the world as I interpret it in the eyes of my children and grandchildren. I paint representationally, focusing on still life’s and landscapes that contain sentimental objects that bridge the generational gap between how I portray the life event and how my grandchildren do.
