About Me

I am a self-taught artist living and working in the Skagit Valley in the Pacific Northwest.  I have been painting and making things ever since a serendipitous encounter with the late artist Ed Kamuda in a grocery store in Bellingham, Washington about 20 years ago.  Ed soon became my friend and mentor.  Together we explored and made paintings of mountain places, valleys, fields, forests, sea rocks, the San Juan Islands, and the desert canyons of Central Washington.  We hiked to mountain passes with our paint boxes, and painted in all kinds of weather even snow.  I suppose these experiences and the stories therein are what can be called the formative years.  And though these are only memories now, there are still the pathways that have emerged from them.  

 

 Today I continue to wander and camp and hike to find sources for the paintings, while the wood constructions are separate from this.  These, the wood constructions, are things I began to make from pieces of wood that I would pick up on my walks around town and near the railroad tracks.  These pieces of wood fascinated me in their various changed states, bleached by the sun, dabbed in the rust bleeds of dead nails, broken and discarded in so many different ways.  Piecing them together on a single plane, I discovered how much I enjoyed creating tensions between them, and if I added paint, they could become more integrated, more complete.  It gives me great pleasure to make these.