Have Chardonnay, will paint!

 "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create."
                                                                                     ...Albert Einstein

I was born a city kid, on Mount Washington, in Pittsburgh, PA.  I am truly blessed with artistic genes.  Mom was an extremely talented artist and Dad was a highly creative engineer. They  encouraged me to draw and paint...and Mom kept everything I did, even the "masterpieces" I drew with crayon on our dining room wallpaper.  

My parents decided to move to the country when I was about five years old and my sister and I were raised on 92 acres of Pennsylvania woodlands, surrounded by endless fields, farmland and gravel roads. We had a wonderful home which had started out as a one-room log cabin and our nearest neighbor was a mile away, far beyond any digitized roads.  My friends and I hunted and fished year-round and we were all driving tractors, pickups and “vintage vehicles” by the time we were 10 years old.   It was a great time and place to be a kid!
 

My formal art training came from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh (where I met my wife, Donna), Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Ivy School of Professional Art.  I was fortunate to be chosen for an internship at the advertising giant, Ketchum, MacLeod & Grove, followed by another internship at one of the era's largest exhibit companies, GRS&W.  They hired me and so I simply stayed!  

My early career included designing trade shows and exhibits for corporations like Kodak, Xerox, and IBM along with such prestigious venues as the Buffalo Museum of Science and the original National Aeronautic & Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institute.  I also did lots of pre-PhotoShop "cut and paste" graphic work and got to co-create several early computer driven audio-visual performances.

My art is published in limited editions, displayed in art exhibitions and seen in publications as diverse as “Décor Magazine” and “The Midwest Farm and Livestock Directory”.  Through my publisher and licensing agent, my images are available as high-quality jigsaw puzzles, calendars, greeting cards, etc.  My work has been sold nationally and internationally and my collectors hail from such wide-spread locations as Boston, Los Angeles, Victoria, British Columbia, New Zealand, Scotland, England and Finland. 

I am currently an instructor at the Centers for the Arts Bonita Springs, Florida and I’m blessed to have some of the best artists in all of Southwest Florida in my studio.  

I am honored to say that my work has received top awards in juried shows from California to Florida.  But by far, the most meaningful rewards are those I receive for giving back to others.  Together, my wife and I work on “giving something back” by using my artwork to help support charities engaged in Cancer Research and those who assist our US Military Veterans.

I truly hope you like my artwork...because that means you like me!