A brief introduction.

I was born 1962 in Monroe, Louisiana. My early years were spent outside the farming village of Mer Rouge, where my father raised rice, soybeans and cattle, and my mother raised me and my little brother. From the start, drawing was my major form of activity and even self-identity; I was “the kid who draws”. When I was nine years old, we all moved to the Ozark Mountain town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, which became, and remains, the home base for my extended family.

I grew up and decided I had to see a few more places and try a few options not offered in a small town. Bouncing through a handful of college majors—even studying art for a few semesters—I eventually finished school at Belmont University in Nashville, ready for a career as a sound engineer…and for a long time, in various parts of the country, that’s what I did. I recorded album projects, engineered radio programs and toured with bands. And drew pictures.

After years of fits and starts, I began to get serious about painting in the late 1990s. I got off the road, eventually settling in the Kansas City area. I set up a studio in the basement of a little house in the suburbs and began doing solo and group shows. I was at it constantly and my paintings got bigger and more ambitious, but by 2009, I hit a patch of work that just didn’t feel “true” somehow…the spark was not there. I decided I would take a month off painting and try to think about a different approach.

That “month” turned into several years with no approach at all. Aside from my still-frequent sketching and the occasional watercolor, art seemed to have ghosted me. It was a lonely feeling, a mystery I couldn’t answer, like a long and great friendship gone cold. But slowly, and just as mysteriously, it crept back in. The last few years have seen me painting pretty regularly, and the approach has been different this time. Essentially, it has been more relaxed, less worried about outcomes and more about letting things happen with the controls set at “loose”.

When I briefly studied art in college, the emphasis was on self-expression. It had been so for nearly a century in the art world, this idea of putting one’s innermost feelings (of turmoil, struggle, rapture, alienation, etc., ad infinitum!) on canvas for the world to see what sensitive souls we are. It was an idea that remained with me when I later took up painting seriously, and it might have been the part of my pursuit that didn’t feel “true”…for what I’ve found, after that l-o-n-g month off, is that I’m not interested in expressing myself through art. If there’s anything I want to express, it’s my fascination with the sensual experience of being alive in this world. I want to engage with the world (especially the part we take in through our sight) and appreciate it through the medium of art. This approach, finally, has begun to give my work the “true” feeling that went missing earlier.

It is good to be here. Here. Edward Abbey said it best:

“I want to weep. Not for joy, not for sorrow, but for the incomprehensible wonder of our brief lives beneath the oceanic sky.”

Me, too. But I can’t weep all the time; it’s exhausting. I can paint, though, and that feels like a fitting response to all this incomprehensible wonder.