About the Artist

            I think of myself as a traditional realist. 

            I believe that the soul of an artwork is emotional expression, and consequently I draw and paint whatever genuinely moves me.  I'm attracted to strong lighting, interesting textures, and bright colors, so my paintings, while firmly rooted in realism, tend to be bright, high key, and strongly colored.   My subject matter can be quite diverse, but I'm probably best described as a landscape artist.  Mountain scenes from the numerous backpacking and hiking trips I have been on are a  favorite, as are coastal scenes, and few scenes excite me more than to come across a beautiful and rugged waterfall. My children have also appeared in many of my paintings. 

            I find I'm always trying to tell a story with my paintings, whether it be capturing a glance, or a moment of light or movement, or simply showing the grandeur of nature around us.   I try to make these stories positive and cheerful, and I hope that my work brings a little joy into the lives of those who see it.

BIOGRAPHY

            I was born in Cottingham, England, in 1954, and emigrated with my family to Canada in 1957. My interest in drawing began when I was very young. Of course, all children experiment with drawing, and I did the usual amount of scribbling and coloring, I suppose, but the thing that first ‘lit the fire’ in me, so to speak, was when I discovered comic books. Wow, telling stories with pictures! Particularly war stories, like Sgt. Rock and Enemy Ace. I spent endless hours copying the drawings, sometimes all onto one large sheet to make a huge battle scene! I had no idea how these books were created, but looking back now as an adult who has worked in the profession, I realize that I was learning from true masters. Truthfully, drawing panel to panel illustrated stories is one of the most demanding of the art disciplines and I think the long hours of laborious copying was one of the best art educations I could have had.   

When I was thirteen, I did have one short set of classes from a well known local artist named Dick Van Den Hoogen, but it turned out that I really had little patience for formal art instruction, either there or in high school. I was far more content to teach myself by copying and imitating the work of artists that I liked, and by continual sketching and experimenting.

            In the late 1970’s, I studied Theatre at Mount Royal College in Calgary and TV and Film Production at Brigham Young University in Utah. Interestingly enough, I spent a great deal of time in classes doodling and drawing all over the notes I was supposed to be taking! Teachers were great at encouraging me to do something with the art, especially at BYU, where I encountered for the first time the world class talents of men like William Whitaker and James Christensen. Nevertheless, I loved movies and I loved making movies. Still do. Movies are like moving comic books, or rather, comic books are like still movies. It’s all about the juxtaposition of images to create a story. But I was there to learn about movies, so I kept at it, and the artwork I did was only for my own enjoyment.

In the end, though, I never quite graduated film school. I met a wonderful woman while spending a summer at home in Canada. We got married, and went together back to school at BYU, but soon found that we were pregnant with our first child.   We couldn’t afford to have the baby in America, so we moved back home.  I got work as a milkman, as I recall, but it wasn’t long before people started to ask me to do drawings and paintings for them, mostly portraits, and I became a part time professional!  Soon after that I heard about a small art show being held at a local leisure center, and somehow I got a few paintings together and got myself entered in my very first show. 

I don’t recall selling anything, but I did meet the woman who had organized the show and discovered that she regularly organized lots of shows in shopping malls all across western Canada. She liked my work and invited me into the shows.  They became a regular thing for me.  There would be maybe fifteen to twenty artists and we’d set up our displays in the middle of the malls, and paint and show and sell our work all week long.   It was such a great opportunity for me!  I’d hang out with other artists, which was a fantastic learning experience, and paint and sell to the public as they shopped in the malls.  It was about this time that I first tried watercolors.

            I watched another artist work with them and thought, “That doesn’t look so hard.” I bought a cheap set of watercolors and tried it.  It came out surprisingly well, so I did three or four more and hung them on my display in a mall.  They started to sell right away!  I was quite surprised! I’d heard a lot of people talk about watercolors with fear and trepidation in their voices as if it was a next to impossible medium to work with.  I found it quick and refreshing after working with oils for the previous few years.  Watercolors felt to me like more of an illustrative medium, and working with them was not unlike illustrating comic books.  I found I could express myself somehow easier and better with watercolors.  So as more and more people began tell me how much they loved my watercolors, I decided to focus most of my efforts in that medium. 

While working and showing in malls, I was approached by a man and woman who said they were starting a gallery, and wanted me to be in it.  I jumped at the chance and began a long and interesting relationship with them at the Artnest Gallery in Calgary.  Over the next decade I produced hundreds and hundreds of watercolor paintings.  I had many shows at the Artnest, and did many commissions through them as well.  I expanded my markets out to include other galleries and cities, most notably Banksiana Gallery in Edmonton.   My artwork found it’s way into private and corporate collections across Canada and the United States, into England and other countries of Europe, to Australia, New Zealand, and even the Far East.  I taught a lot of art, too, both private and group classes.

Though all of this sounds very successful, the truth is, it was not easy.  My family was growing (eventually to seven children!) and it was difficult to keep up with the financial demands.  It meant doing a lot of art that I didn’t really want to do, and after a dozen years or so, I began to feel like I was burning out.  So I did something a little bit different, but very familiar to me - I drew up some comic book samples and sent them off to a few different publishers, to see if I could break into that industry. 

I wasn’t really hopeful of getting work. It’s a notoriously hard industry to break into, even if you live near where the publishers are and can go right to their offices with your work.  I was on the other side of the continent.  Nevertheless, I needed a change, so I made up some stories and drew a few pages of panel to panel sequential storytelling and sent them off.  I got two or three rejection slips and had pretty much decided it wasn’t going to work, when I got a phone call one day from a small independent publisher named Innovation Comics. They were doing a comic book based on the TV series Quantum Leap, and they liked my realistic style and offered me an issue to do. It was hard work, but great fun!  Not long after, I received another phone call from a different publisher, this time Dark Horse Comics. They offered me a four issue mini series called Virus, which I accepted. These were longer books, 32 pages per issue, as opposed to the normal 22 to 24, and they were tough to do. I had to draw all kinds of things I had no idea about, like ocean going salvage tugboats, giant diesel engines, Chinese seaplanes, and so on.  And this was before Google was around to provide easy reference for everything you've never seen!  It was a huge amount of fun, and also the most intensely difficult art discipline I've ever encountered.

I had a few other comic book jobs after that, and then it suddenly ended as fast as it had started.  I was a naïve young man who just loved to draw, and didn't understand that in the commercial art arena, I needed a great deal of business acumen to go along with artistic ability.  It became clear that schmoozing and making connections was just as important as drawing, and I simply was not equipped for it.

So there I was without a job, and it had been well over a year since I had pulled out of the galleries and stopped doing fine art.  I suddenly found myself in the position of having to temporarily step back from the art for a while and get a ‘real’ job to support my family.  Art became my part-time profession again, and I became a full-time hardwood flooring contractor.  

I was very fortunate during this time that even though fine art became a difficult thing for me to do regularly, I was blessed to be given some illustrative work on movies!  I was hired by an amazing costume designer, Wendy Partridge, to illustrate her costume designs for movies such as Underworld, Hellboy, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and others.   Wow, illustrating comic book type movies!  It was awesome!

My greatest blessing, though, is an incredible wife who always believed in me, and is very supportive and helpful, and encourages me all the time to pursue and fulfill my calling as an artist.  
            Now, as I have finally retired from hardwood flooring and come back to the art full time, I have found that the time away has re-ignited my passion for painting and drawing.   I have been fortunate to travel a little bit, and there are so many things I have seen which need to find their way into a painting, and which I am excited to express visually.  I still do some watercolors, but I am really enjoying working with oils right now, and, just like my early years, I can still occasionally be found playing hooky drawing comic book characters in my sketchbooks.

I have always believed that the soul of an artwork is in the emotion that is expressed. There are many people who can reproduce an image with technical skill in some medium or another, but that image doesn’t necessarily have any power to move the viewer.   But there are some artists whose work reaches out and grabs you and not only makes you look, but makes you feel something, some connection, as you look.  It comes from some deep instinctive place where we store all those feelings and reactions and passions that we have.  What makes a great artist is the ability to pull those feelings out and put them on a canvas or a piece of paper in such a way that the viewer also feels them.  I hope someday to be a great artist like that.