Artist Biography

I was born in 1948 in Regensburg, Germany to American parents. As artists, my mother and father met at Pratt Institute in New York. Despite a full-time career as a military officer, my Father kept up with his art and I benefited from his knowledge as I was growing up. Both my brother and sister are artists
and now my son and daughter. After spending 4 years in the military from 1966 to 1970, I worked
briefly as a billboard painter before moving to Hawaii. There I painted watercolors and
sketched supporting myself as a waiter and lifeguard.

At the end of this first time in Hawaii, I separated from my first wife and then came back to the mainland. I wandered through the northwest painting signs and eventually wound up as a logger in Oregon. While logging, I received an injury to my knee and after recovery I left Oregon to become
a deckhand on riverboats pushing barges on the Mississippi river. My union hall was in
Joliet, Illinois and I mainly worked the river between Minneapolis and Chicago with an occasional
trip as far south as St. Louis. After about 3 years I met my second wife, left the river and moved to
Eureka, California to attend College of the Redwoods as an art major. I had planned to attend
Humboldt State College after College of the Redwoods, but my wife became
very ill from the dampness of the northwest and we moved to Maui, Hawaii to enjoy its wonderful
climate and beauty. There I had the pleasure of selling my paintings in galleries, working as a
freelance illustrator and owning my own sign business.

After spending 20 years on Maui, we moved to Las Vegas, Nevada.
I worked as a designer for a large company, designing interior sign displays for casinos around the country and cruise ships. We enjoyed the desert and surrounding areas, but missed the ocean. We moved to Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, WA. to enjoy a more quiet lifestyle, close to the ocean and a place where I could concentrate more on doing my fine art.

Fine art has always been a part of my life no matter where I've been or what I've had to do to survive.
I simply must do it and it's something I do totally for myself. Even though the end result
may not be what I had hoped, the process of doing it is what I enjoy the most. If someone gets
an emotional response from my work that pleases me very much.
It has been that way since I was a small boy.