Biography:

Born 1938, Auburn, NY
In High School, I worked evenings and weekends in a local museum, hanging exhibits, and unpacking/packing art. I gained the greatest interest in painting while in military service, spending two years in Vicenza, Italy, where I saw the works of Tiepolo, Titiano, and other Venetian painters. After the military, I studied painting and printmaking at the Iniversity of Illinois-Urbana's School of Art & Design, studying painting under Edward Betts, Enrique Castro-Cid, Douglas Hilson and Frank Gunther. I also studied printmaking under Dennis Rowan and Eugenio Tellez, who had been studio manager for Atelier 17 in Paris prior to that. In the late 60's and early 70's, I worked on large assemblages of shaped canvases articulating space with vivid stripes and voids. I also worked at that time on single-plate color etchings and multiple-plate engravings using industrial milling machines, as well as photo-silkscreen processes.

Because of the need to raise a family, my work was dormant for a number of years, but I began creating more intensely about three years ago, beginning with ideas that could be developed on a smaller scale than 6' X 15'. My more recent paintings, while presenting spatial and formal ideas, also focus on the interaction of color and how it articulates the canvas through contrasts and edge effects. The edge effects I am interested in employ a retinal glow that results from the juxtaposition of two or more colors, and how they effect the viewer's understanding of a painting on a visceral level. I see a painting as a conversation between the artist and an unknown viewer, and strive to make that viewer see what I see inside. It is my hope that the viewer will go away with a more positive world view than when he arrived.