"I work to express a truth, in visual terms, of how I experience things directly.  This experience is where the painting's progress arises from a kind of listening along with and inside all of the doing that makes the work.  My experience is the intimate direct perception that manifests before memory, agendas, ideas and concepts come up.  In my studio, the insights usually come in a number of flashes as I work.  I have learned that if I quickly get in where I don't know what I'm doing, that something is allowed or even provoked, from out of the 'chaos' soon enough the work to be done chases ME down - not the other way around.

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I enjoy working with mixed media in the spirit of the Surrealists who introduced the idea of non-logical juxtaposition of unrelated images. By combining unrelated materials in the same manner, I seek to provoke and inspire a profound appreciation of aesthetic merit, free of conscious control.  There is a certain surrender to the 'Eternal What Is' in this kind of work and that surrender reveals what is there inside my experience all along if I only just let go of expectations and habit.  It is naturally in all Experience.  This I find, is at the root of creativity.  Too much of the painter in a painting and the natural being-ness cannot light up the senses.  This need not be consciously apparent to the viewer.  They can nevertheless, have a sense of it through direct experience of it, like the taste of an orange."

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My thoughts about Art in the time of Covid:   "The Covid pandemic asks us to be present to what is actually going on moment to moment.  It can be exhausting.  On the other hand, that very presence is the root source of creativity.  We can get lost in stories with bad outcomes or stories of rosy futures disconnected from what's present to what's happening or even going to happen.  I take the challenge of remaining present to what's happening right into my studio when I work and when I teach on-line or give demos.  I am discovering that students, as well as myself, learn a most direct way of working on their art and even somehow in thinking about difficult 'lockdown' situations.  The creative connection is obvious enough.  I teach the direct sense of Intuitive Vitality and coupled with proven rules of design principles, I offer ways to get 'unstuck' when working on art.  I encourage the student to take the frightening blank canvas as exactly the kind of opportunity that leans right into creativity, where awareness, direct perception and vitality are engaged.  First "make a mess" and go right from there.  This is a surrender to creative energy just as it is.  It is what I use every time I go into the studio for my own work."