Artist

Biography

I have a BFA Degree in painting and drawing from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, have exhibited widely in the State of Hawaii and have paintings in the permanent collections of the Hawaii State Foundation On Culture And The Arts, the Honolulu Mayor’s Collection and many private collections in Hawaii, elsewhere in the US and in Europe. I now live and work on my art in West Oakland, California.

I think of myself as a painter's painter, i.e., I am concerned with the materials and techniques of painting. Although oil is my primary medium, I have also worked in watercolor and encaustic.

For some years my subject was trees; the stateliness of individual trees and the contrasts of order and chaos inherent to orchards. This work encompasses a range of mediums and scale from small to very large. The latter of this series evolved from the patterns found on sycamore tree trunks into pure abstraction and brilliant color.

Most recently, I have returned to the figure and portraiture in a monochromatic palette. By limiting myself to black, white, shades of gray and some silver metallic pigments, the elements of design are more apparent. These paintings are oil on canvas or oil on wood panel and modest in size. The portraits are psychological studies and there is a melancholy inherent to all of these paintings; a beauty and sadness reflective of our time.