March Member of the Month

Drawing has been a passion of mine since I was old enough to hold a pencil.  It is a skill I have worked at all my life.  I never attained a formal art education but took many college art classes and attended painting workshops to help develop my skills. 

After graduating from NC State University,  I worked as an industrial engineer for Union Carbide. It took only two years before I discovered the corporate life was not the path I wanted to follow, so I resigned from Union Carbide and worked for a few years for a start-up company in Atlanta. That company soon went out of business so I moved to Charlotte and became a commercial real estate broker in order to make a living while attending art classes at CPCC,  Queens University, a semester of studio oil painting at UNCA and master workshops at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

Eventually my wife Liz and I moved to Davidson. We started a tree farm off East Rocky Road where we planted over six thousand deciduous shade trees to grow for landscaping contractors in our region. Liz worked the farm while I started a boutique real estate management and development company on Main Street in town. We lived on the farm for 25 years, sold the farm in 2009 and moved into town. 

I now spend part of my days working for the non-profit Davidson Lands Conservancy, but mostly working  and enjoying painting in my studio at home over the garage. I hope to maintain the spirit of painting as long as I live. It is a continuous process of experimentation, failure and learning from my mistakes. I am inspired by the overlooked things in life; lichen on a rotting log, the reflection of sunlight on water, paint dripped on a sidewalk, a torn corner of wallpaper revealing an under layer, a smear of printers' ink on a board. Magnified views sometimes reveal a rainbow of colors and odd shapes, almost magical in detail. I photograph these items for potential use as a model for a painting, graphically manipulating them, enlarging details, saturating colors and elevating contrasts. It is an effort to un-conceal the self-concealing and render from that an image previously unseen.