I started building this website with the intention of creating an online portfolio to showcase my artwork, but it started turning into a form of autobiography (with all the notes and descriptions on each page). I really don't want to do that; such a story would take too much time, and frankly, you would never believe some of the stuff that's happened to me (I lived through it, and I have a difficult time believing it, let alone explaining it to anyone else). Besides, I would like to think my artwork tells my story better than I could do in words. As Robert Henri writes in The Art Spirit:

"The brush stroke at the moment of contact carries inevitably the exact state of being of the artist at that exact moment into the work, and there it is, to be seen and read by those who can read such signs, and to be read later by the artist himself, with perhaps some surprise, as a revelation of himself."

And a bit later, he writes:

“[The artist] paints, and whether he wills it or not, each brush stroke is an exact record of such as he was at the exact moment the stroke was made."

So my job here is not to tell my story, but just to assemble a body of my work, and let you, dear reader, be the judge of what story is told. The process of assembling this body of work began with a very thorough cleaning/reorganizing of my studio, where I discovered old drawings and paintings that had been hidden away, in some cases, for decades. The more I cleaned, the more old artworks came to light, including many which I had completely forgotten. In years past, I would only share a narrow selection of my strongest work, taking care to hide away any work I considered flawed or imperfect or embarrassing (like the work in the "Very Random Illustration Work" section). But I am older now, and I confess I enjoy the walk down memory lane, revisiting some of the things I had done long ago and nearly forgotten. Maybe I have become less harshly critical with age, or maybe I am getting sentimental about days gone by, but I am looking at my early works now, not so much with harsh self-criticism, but maybe with more empathy for what art students must go through to develop their skills. I have watched my students struggle to improve their skills, and I think they actually benefit from seeing my struggles, my mistakes, my paintings where I didn't quite get it right, as well as the progress I have made over the years. And so on this website, I am showing a wider selection of my work, including some of the earlier works, even some of my less-successful efforts. If I show only the successful ones, I am not telling the whole story, and perhaps the larger story is really about the artistic struggle: the sacrifices we make for our art, the time and energy we must commit to honing our skills, experimenting and exploring different media, techniques, approaches, and making many mistakes along the way - and picking ourselves up after making the mistakes and going at it yet again. Telling that larger story requires that I show more of the volume of my work, and so I have tried to do that on this site. Even so, it takes a lot of time to photograph/scan, format, and catalog so many old drawings and paintings (not to mention, adding commentary and notes), and I have already burned up so much time on this as it is. For every drawing or painting that you see on this site, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, more that you don't see here. But hopefully I have shown at least enough to tell something of that larger story.

Finally, one more objective I had for this site was to answer a silly criticism that is lobbed at me on occasion: some critics think I work only in a single medium or technique or approach, and never explore anything beyond that. For example, I go to a figure drawing session and work in charcoal, practicing exercises like those taught in the Watts Atelier Online program (an approach which requires constant practice/repetition to achieve mastery). For me, figure drawing sessions are the artist's equivalent of going to the gym and doing pushups; I go in the same mind as the athlete training for competition, or the martial arts master sharpening his technique. I practice proportions, gesture, construction, and value scales in the same way that a classical guitarist practices musical scales. However, the critics only see me working in charcoal, and they assume I never do anything else outside of the figure drawing sessions. Some of the critics feel it is their place to prompt me away from my practice in charcoal. They seem to think I should do more "expressive" or "modern" approaches, like the framed example on the left in the cartoon below (and just so you know, I am primarily left-handed, but I drew the figure on the left with my right hand - it wasn't exactly a challenge for me).