From the age of two I knew I had to create, even though I didn't know what it meant to be an artist. I colored on everything…walls, tables, chairs, any surface I could find. When one day I broke my mother’s china plates into little pieces to redesign them into sparkling pieces in a mud background, my family started to realize how determined I was. Throughout my childhood and teens, I continued to explore different ways of expressing my inner world without much outer guidance until I went to study at The University of Kansas and then on to gain a masters degree in painting at Kent State University, Ohio. After graduating I taught art at universities and got married. At that point, it seemed that I was set for the secure and safe life that everyone, including me, thought was the ultimate goal. Then something happened: I had honed my artistic skills, I had the education and a stable, new life with a home, studio and wife…but my ideas stopped.

So I fell back on my second love, philosophy. Maria, my wife, and I set out to discover the world of metaphysics, ancient religion, spirituality and philosophy in Europe and India. We left the US with only $800 in our pockets.

After ten years of exploration, we found ourselves broke, living in Southern Spain with a newborn baby. I decided it was time to test some of the knowledge we had acquired in all of the studies we had explored. Our travels had given rise to plenty of ideas, but the question was, how to turn them into paintings and make a living?
In 1974, after almost ten years of absence, I returned to painting. I went from acrylic to oil paint, abstract to figurative, and started to explore ways to express magic on canvas…to create fantasy landscapes, costumed figures, balancing archetypal symbols with the collective unconscious world of Jung and my own personal dream world.

As all these worlds collided and danced through my first few paintings, I began to see a new world emerge with a strange mix of different ages and time scapes, joined together with archetypal symbols that were used across civilizations and indeed, have been signposts of humanity. It is in our collective dream world that we spend half of our lives inhabiting.

Here is a chronological order of my paintings from those first experiments to the present. There are five decades of testing the power of those symbols with magic, emotion, and sometimes with fun and humor.

The paintings in this collection would not have existed if not for the ten years I was not painting.