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I was born in Olean, N.Y on July 2, 1947. My mother and father lived
in a refurbished cabin in the mountains of Port Allegheny, Pa. He was
a director of oil fields and my mother had been educated and worked
as a fashion artist.
When the oil fields dried up, my parents moved to the Philadelphia area.
My family and I moved around a lot in those early years, and finally
settled in Delaware County where I have spent most of my life.
As a child I loved art, mechanical toys, trains and erector sets. My
mother stressed throughout my childhood that I should never become an
artist because “artists can never make a living.” Therefore,
as I approached the end of high school, I settled on a career in engineering.
The day I signed up for Mechanical Engineering Technology at Temple,
I knew I had chosen the wrong field. But I finished the program and
worked as a mechanical designer and draftsman for 3-1/2 years. I worked
my way into technical illustration, took some courses at the Philadelphia
College of Art (now the University of the Arts), and found a job as
an artist at a marketing firm. After four years as an Art Director,
I was promoted to Creative Director, moved on to a job at an advertising
firm, and then formed my own design business in 1978.
Since 1968, I have illustrated and painted. In the late ‘60s and
early ‘70s I was fascinated with the surrealists. By the mid-70s,
after years as a draftsman, I produced a large body of pen and ink drawings
combining fantasy with historical themes. Large canvases with bold colors
followed in the late-70s and ’80s.
Then in 1991, I painted the Media Theater and produced signed reproductions as part of a community fundraiser to help keep the theater. The County Theater in Doylestown was next, and seven other theaters followed throughout the nineties (click for theatre paintings).
In 2002, I was asked to paint the Indiana Theater in Indiana, Pennsylvania
and sell prints as a fund raising effort for the Jimmy Stewart Museum.
The painting features on its marquee the film “It’s a Wonderful
Life” starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.
In the past several years, I have turned to creating small paintings of buildings and landscapes from life when on vacation and on weekends. In the past two years, I have created nearly 40 paintings of the homes of my area, vacation spots, and the changing the light in various seasons. These paintings verge on impressionism, and have provided me with a freedom of expression that I have longed for my whole life (click for small paintings).
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