Contemporary realism is the descriptive term for my work. Structure, defined edges and clarity is the subtitle of this style. Within the genres of landscape, still life or urban scenes, I have focused on composition, balancing verticality with the horizontal, and shifts in color values and intensities. The goal is for an image with visible differentiation, but at the same time, unity. I utilize direct perception, stored experience and my imagination, working only from my own photographs or sketches as source material. The solidity and balance in my work provides a counter point to the unstable and unsure times we live in.
I was born into, and grew up in, a military family and we moved every four or soyears, to and from dramatically different environments. My earliest memories, of living in a small English village and traveling to continental Europe with my family on trips, had a lasting impact on my visual education. My high school years in the Washington DC area, with wonderful art teachers, school field trips, and family outings to art galleries enhanced this growth. Instead of attending my top college choice of Syracuse University, due to a family situation, I spent four years at Ohio Wesleyan University attaining a BFA degree in painting and printmaking. The high point of these years was a semester spent in New York City on a special program in which I worked as an apprentice for a well known New York figure painter, Philip Pearlstein. After college, I moved to Washington DC and pursued a Master's degree in art history. I actually completed my course work and wrote mythesis while living in Geneva, Switzerland, for three years. I had moved there and my faculty advisors at George Washington University enabled me to complete my degree requirements while there, an early example of remote learning.
From then on, my family maintained a mobile lifestyle and we moved back and forth from Washington and elsewhere. Five more years in Bern (Switzerland), Bonn (West Germany), Paris, Moscow, Frankfurt and, later, Indonesia. During these decades,wherever I was, I maintained a studio, produced a body of work and exhibited. In Moscow and Frankfurt, I also worked as an art teacher in international schools.
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