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I graduated from the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts, in Newark, New Jersey in 1968 and won several state and local shows in the early 1970’s. I have had numerous one-man shows in both New Jersey and in California and has exhibited in many fine galleries as well.
For more than 50 years I have been calling myself an artist. It began on my tenth Christmas in 1957 when my father gave me an oil paint set. I used up some of the colors and all of the canvas boards and needed more supplies. So I began going door to door to sell my paintings for $25 dollars around the block where I lived in Shark River Hills, New Jersey. Someone took pity on me and bought my first painting and that’s really all I have wanted to do ever since. I first used watercolor only to make color notations on pencil sketches for oils. I realize that the pencil line inhibited the brush stroke, so gradually I eliminated all pencil drawing and began blocking in large areas of color, isolating the white space, often becoming the paintings focal point.
As a young man, and being inspired by Winslow Homer, one of my first watercolor trips was to his home state of Maine. I remember waiting for over an hour for my paper to dry as I tried to paint on the foggy coastline. Thank goodness Fredrick Remington was also an influence to me inspiring my interest in western landscape and the desert.
This is a fast medium, lending itself to painting on location, demanding a rapid approach. There’s nothing like being there, in the moment, capturing the feel of the location. It also helps give the paintings a sense of place that is hard to achieve when working from photographs because the limited tonal range of a photograph cannot match what the human eye can adjust to and see.
