 Creating is a way of life. My lifetime of drawing and painting has been strongly informed by visual reality, but also, and perhaps more importantly, my work represents a deep emotional response to highly personal subjects and the surrounding dynamics of light and space. This body of work represents several parallel projects focused on bridging the curious space between abstraction and life. From portraiture to pond life, from city streets to intimate gardens, it is my intention to evoke a feeling, not a certainty. I do not wish to copy nature, but rather to reveal the unknown. Using spontaneous line and heightened color, I explore the shapes and spaces of my subject. Inspired by feelings of power and satisfaction contained in the action of painting, I become increasingly aware that everything in and around me is made of stardust. As a working artist and art educator in the Midwest, I fuse delicate threads of memory with immediate exacting observations to create visual poetry about people and places important to me. The intense bright sky and rugged landscape of California permeate my thoughts. I find the power of place changing my perceptions and altering my palette. I journey as a painter under the clear bright California sky exploring paths to deeper understanding and communication using the language of art. Portraiture continues to be a main catalyst in my painting practice, but I also find it impossible to resist the peacefulness of a pond or the bustle of city streets or intricacies of garden life. My interest lies in our deep connectedness to all life, in our oneness in this shared world. I work outside enjoying the intensity of the luminous sky. I have experimented with various oils and mediums finding that the dry California air is to be contended with. I work with a furious curiosity using an exacting process of appraisal and adjustment as the ephemeral light constantly changes. I prefer viewing my subject as I work but find that much of an image emerges from intuitive imagination and memory with the help from photographic records. My early childhood memories include the eyes of lifeless canvas strangers, dark and mysterious following my every move. Great important antique paintings of faces were displayed in elaborate gold frames on every wall of our family home. I grew up understanding that in my family portraits ruled. My art dealer father often surprisingly and unceremoniously removed one face only to replace it with another. Perhaps this explains my compelling need to study every face I encounter today. The countless portraits I produced as a child are long gone but my fascination with the significance of portraiture remains. I am still at it drawing and painting faces that I meet. While I search for personal meaning in the long tradition of portraiture I am determined to approach the subject with empathy striving always to illuminate the connection between viewer, subject and my artist self. I use the power and satisfaction contained in the action of painting to create honest studies revealing the brightness and mystery of every man. For 30 years my mark making has been concerned with sharing memories of significant moments that have the power to replenish and transform. The marks, their messages and the act of making them all play a part in my creative process. I seek to translate delicate threads of memory into a new reality making the unknowable dimensions of the subject felt. Light that lies across the planes of a face, shapes hovering above dark water. The memory of a sound, all to be shared in a visual conversation that informs us of our humanness. My effort at rendering the significance of a moment is a flash in the boundless universe. This importance lies in the sharing of a creative experience that further connects us as we reckon with eternity.