Color and Light

Art has been important to me throughout my life, but I always had a problem settling down and concentrating on just one kind of art.  I threw myself into music, cartoons,  video, and photography.  The only painting I had done happened during a painting course at university, and that only lasted as long as the course.

Since the 1960’s, photography has been a consistent part of my life.  I sought to capture the rich colors and striking light of the natural world.  After decades of taking photos, I realized that, as I was aiming my camera, in the back of my mind I was thinking “This would make a nice subject for a painting”.

In 2005, two years into retirement, another realization came to me; “If I don’t start painting now, I never will”.  So I rifled through my wife’s collection of acrylic paints and paper, choose a photo of a cabbage as a subject, and began to paint.

Photography is still deeply important in my art.  The reason I take a photo of a particular object is usually either because of the colors that are presented or the effects of subtle or blatant light.  I seek to capture those same things in my painting.  I can’t improve on what nature creates, so I do representational art and describe my style as ‘segmented realism’.  I strive to make my paintings look  photographic when viewed from a distance, but from up close one can see it is a grid of individually painted square segments.   I generally paint one square of the painting each day.

I was born in 1947 and grew up in Evansville, IN.  I immigrated to British Columbia in 1973 and taught in a one room school for 3 years.   Joan and I settled in the Robson Valley near McBride, BC in 1977.  We live on a small hobby farm nestled beside the Canadian Rocky Mountains.  I spend an average of 2-3 hours a day as a painter striving to be an artist.

I am largely self-taught.  Throughout my education I took art courses whenever I

could.  I graduated from the University of Evansville, in 1969, where my BA degree was in

Elementary Education, but I did managed to take a painting and a drawing class.  Since I began painting

in 2005, I have entered 3 paintings in the Central Interior Regional Art Councils annual juried “ArtFest”

show, and have had all my submitted paintings chosen for the tour of interior BC communities.  I have

paintings for sale in the Whistlestop Gallery

in McBride.

I try to take a photo everyday of something interesting about living in the mountains of central B.C. and write about it on the blog (above)