With just enough challenge growing up to gain some deep colors and spectrum in my life, I have made use of the follies and torture of being human and turned them into joy and happiness by finding something that truly spoke to my soul – visiting remote natural areas and painting.

I was always creative and searching for outlets from a young age on into adulthood – poetry, drawing, pottery, photography, music, gardening, web design, graphic design, animation, paper arts, carpentry, psychedelics… But nothing really grabbed me. My grandmother on me mother’s side, Sally Kriner, was a fine artist of lovely flower arrangements in the medium of oil painting. I got to know her at age six when my parents divorced and I moved from my birth-land of Louisiana to my grandparent’s cabin home in the woods of Indiana. I found both of my German grandparents to be stern and cold, but they created life around them. It was as though my grandmother’s art and my grandfather’s love of being in the woods was where the magic seeped through the cracks of their strict German roots and depression era upbringing. Her studio occupied a large room with vaulted ceilings, nearly a quarter of the large cabin. The room was placed on the backside of the home with large windows that overlooked the endless rolling hills of deciduous forests where I played. The smell of the woods, their heritage cuisine and wood stoves filled the air as a seed was planted in my soul that would take decades to begin to sprout.

At age 37, I began a small handyman company that grew to success with several employees, breaking a million in revenue in its fifth year. And yet, I was ultimatly unhappy and felt starved for the magic that made life worth living. In a search through various therapists, shamans, psychics, and psychedelics – though all very interesting and helpful, none of them told me particularly that I just needed to paint. None, besides the simplistic art of noticing, and through attentive presence with the life I see around me, depict the richness of color that life emits. Capturing colors and turning them into shapes was urging me to create something. Something. First it was water colors, then my mentor and dear friend, Andre Satie, encouraged me to take up acrylics.

My first attempt was to capture some of the psychedelic states I found natural to my view of life and the world, but found it too aimless and aggravating. I had a great love for the desert of SE Oregon, which I devoured with photography. Deciding my photos alone would never reach the professional level, I took up using them as inspiration for my paintings, which opened up a whole new world of creative outlet, and I finally found a way to blend reality with magic to portray the world as I’ve experienced it.