Though the environment in which I grew up was solid and quite typical when viewed from the outside, it was marked by anger and sadness. In this environment I had ways of coping, surviving, perhaps even thriving. I always drew, wandering constantly into worlds of my own creation. I found great comfort and even solace in wild places. Growing up in the "typical" suburbs of New York, traveling daily into New York City for school, and spending as much time as possible in the wildest places I could, shaped my relationship to place. Later other places where I spent a lot of time alone-- the Adirondack Mountains, the high Sierra, and the desert west, became great sources of inspiration to me. As a pre-teen, having gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to use the research library for a school paper-- only to be told I was too young to be allowed unaccompanied into the library-- I found myself alone in the museum with time on my hands. I discovered Baroque landscape painting. My world was changed. I found I could "travel" into the paintings, much as I could into the wood lots near our suburban house, and find comfort and wonder in them. And I could study. Always academically inclined, I found great joy in studying biology. And in reading. Artists, writers and poets influenced choices I made in my life-- outrageous perhaps, but it is a leap of faith to make art in the first place. Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry among others guided me with their work.

In college I double-majored in biology and art, finally focusing all my energy on art. Later I would return to my love for biology, working for over ten years on a study of the hawk migration in California (as one of many volunteer hawk banders) in the Marin Headlands. I first got involved in this study because of many strange and wonderful encounters I had been having with hawks and owls (click here for a description of one such encounter). I spent countless hours in a blind observing the changing light and the behavior of hawks and other wildlife. This work had a profound influence on my art.

And my work was influenced by week long, completely solitary hikes I took in the high Sierra. Typically hiking in at a trail head at 10,000 feet elevation, I would go in many miles and then wander off trail where no one would find me. Alone for days, I would walk, draw, walk, paint, and walk. Fear, loneliness, and boredom were sometimes my first feelings alone in the wild, but these were quickly replaced by a renewed awareness of comfort, competence, belonging, and even community (of animals) in the woods. As a painter much of my time is spent in lone conversation with this thing in front of me, this quiet thing of great potential power and quiet uneedy desire. I think being alone in the woods and the desert, quietly open to phenomenal reality, has taught me a lot about making a painting.

Several years ago I returned with my family to the Northeast, to Vermont, after over twenty years in California. It has profoundly influenced my work to be once again in the light and land that partly shaped me.

A review of an earlier exhibition described my work as showing “ the clash between nature and urbanity-between belonging and alienation.”  Reviewers have called the work “poignant” and “meditative and otherworldly”. Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that an earlier painting of mine “called ‘Clear Cut’… brings to mind Marsden Hartley’s powerful pictures on the same theme…. the turbulent sky overhead looks like an angry response of nature to the assault on its fecundity. The scale, space, mood, and technique of the painting work together just as they should.”

I received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from California College of Arts in Crafts in San Francisco, CA.  I have had one man shows at  (among other places) Gallery Paula Anglim, the Patricia Sweetow Gallery, and Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco, and have been in numerous group shows throughout the U.S. My work can be found in many collections including TW Trust in Dallas, TX, The Rene and Veronica DiRosa Foundation, and The Plowshares Foundation.

An Owl Story:

I had been having many "encounters" with hawks and owls for awhile, probably very average kinds of contact, but these seemed of special import to me. While I was walking or running in the hills or elsewhere, I would sense something, look up and find an owl hovering just above me (at least once then to witness the owl alight next to me on a ledge and copulate with its mate).

In the mid 1980's I was at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming on a residency, and these encounters were continuing there. One night after dinner as I was in my studio painting, a violent thunderstorm swept in off the slope of the nearby mountains. Lightening was striking everywhere, traveling horizontally inches above the ground. The power in the studio, which was in a converted barn, had been knocked out, so after several hours of sitting in the dark I decided I would try to return to the converted school house that was our residence (not a wise decision had I great concern for my own well being). The schoolhouse was a quarter-mile distant across pasture, rough ground, with livestock grazing, including several large bulls (separated from each other by fence line). Crossing this pasture in the dark night with the violent storm raging was out of the question, so I resolved to run the long driveway and county road instead-- a mile long journey, but I had been running a lot, and knew I could cover the ground quickly. Perhaps unwisely, but perhaps also with a fatalism that was not unknown to me, I took off.

The corn in the fields all around had been recently harvested; so surrounding me was only the remaining stubble. I was the tallest thing about, less than ideal conditions for a mad dash through a lightening storm. As I ran I stopped at each cattle guard and waited for a lightening strike so I could see the bars and pick my way across.

Soon I rounded the corner of the schoolhouse, which stood in a grove of cottonwood trees. As I did I sensed a presence nearby. I looked slightly up to my left, and when lightening next struck I saw a great horned owl gliding along next to me just above my shoulder. This bird flew with me until I neared the door of the house. Probably affected by the storm it was simply checking me out, but to me this bird had seen me safely home.

I resolved then somehow to get involved more with these birds. Upon returning to the Bay Area I began working with the study of the hawk migration in California.