Self-portrait 8x10 acrylic on panel
A Fauve self-portrait demo
I am a retired art teacher with a lifelong love for drawing and painting and a room full of canvases.
I was born and raised in Hammond, Indiana, just outside Chicago, got a high school job in a gallery (mostly stretching and framing canvases), getting to know many contemporary working artists.
On my first visit to the Chicago Art Institute I fell in love with the Impressionists, especially Monet and Caillebotte, who painted real people in real places. And I loved the huge size of much of the work.
A summer painting workshop at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, was where I switched from oils to acrylics and finally had a chance to create my own work that could be measured in feet rather than inches.
I had my first one-man shows while in college in Tennessee, then moved to California in pursuit of an MFA. Work and a family became my primary focus, but I continued to enter local shows and paint after the kids were in bed.
While I have painted everything from landscapes to pure abstracts, I keep coming back to people as my preferred subject. I see joy and beauty in people just doing life. I paint what I notice, often using a camera to capture images. (In San Francisco I collected a mountain of photo references to be used later.)
I always have music when I paint. When I find the right soundtrack for a piece, I let it play and replay until I finish.
Once our kids were grown and my wife and I retired from teaching, we left our home in California and moved to the Pacific Northwest. Now I have space and time to make painting my focus and the incredible Oregon Coast is just an hour away.
At work in my San Jose studio about 1984