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 Is there any background history or event in your life that shaped your art work? Where do your ideas for paintings come from? What is your studio like? Does it inspire you? What artists are most important to you? That’s a hard one to answer, because for an artist, all their training, past history, old work, has a hand in forming what they’re doing in the present. My father was an artist, and I grew up interested in painting, encouraged by him, and drawing a lot as a child. I dropped out of regular high school at 16, took a year off to travel around the country and draw and paint, and look at art schools in California, Chicago, and New York. I finally decided on the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, because it had (and still does) a very strong painting department in a time (late 60’s) that like now doesn’t much encourage painting, especially realism. I got an undergraduate and graduate degree from that school, then ended up through a circuitous series of events in Iowa City, studying intaglio printmaking and calligraphy with two masters, Mauricio Lasansky and Father Catich. I then started the difficult process of turning into a working artist. I painted landscape, figures, and still life in both oil and watercolor, and about 15 years ago began painting the kind of still life imagery I’m working with now. |
