San Francisco—the city's commanding beauty—rolling topography, mood, shadows, light, dramatic West Coast architecture, along with the solitary nature of my childhood, instigated it all.  An only child, growing up and residing within the city, ain tandem with the visual urban world surrounding me sealed my destiny to paint.

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Traversing neighborhoods by bus, I was moved to communicate what I observed. Arresting luminosity, bathing the city aroused all senses, and a desperate need to describe. Abstract cubist shapes, chalky pastel stucco surfaces, jagged topiary, definitive blue shadowy hues creating portals to nowhere, complimented the entry ways, doorways, steps, alleys, that were the many subjects of early work.

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​Visits to The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Edward Hopper, Wayne Theibaud, and Richard Diebenkorn were frequently on view, inspired the first urban adobe landscapes, and formed a focused viewpoint within. A confidence of aloneness, solitary mood, and isolation in the paintings remain a common theme throughout three decades of work.

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After buildings as subjects, European garden design, mysterious verdant lush landscapes and green vistas dominated a new phase of dream-like subject matter. Using a dark umber Rembrandt like pallet to describe imagined earthly abysses and dark chasms were conjured while driving the streets of San Francisco at night, where shadows cast lead to nocturnal pathways. Haunting dark forests and pathways dominated the next few years of paintings.

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​In 1995, a pilgrimage to see the master works of Jan Vermeer in Washington DC inspired the desire to capture dissolving light fragments on a two-dimensional surface. Orchard patterns seen from freeways, singular trees, shrub edges, fruit groves, clouds, and oddly sculpted hedges merging into sky, attempt to describe the sensation, the vibration of luminescence coalescing from one form into another, an homage to seeing Vermeer’s brushwork firsthand. The green trees edges melting into vivid sky are a
meditation on light itself and the effects of sight, almost as surrealist as Magritte.

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Subject matter spanning from large nocturnal verdant orbs, earthly chasms, celestial clouds, hay bales, and miniature dreamscapes on wood, brass, gold leaf, linen, burlap, and canvas conjure worlds of potential secrets lurking beyond the surface, unusual qualities beneath the known, to seduce viewers into an inquisitive world of light, dark, the unrevealed. Rather than a quick visit, the paintings encourage the viewer to dwell, to linger in the mysteries within the ordinary.