Biography

I am self-taught as a watercolorist. My only “lessons” as such were a couple of days when I was a teen ager spent in Northern California at a place called The Art Ranch, which I went to with my stepfather who was an amateur painter.

That said, I have attended several art schools, but as a sculptor, and none of my instructors knew I had ever done watercolor. I hold a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts.

All that I’ve learned about watercolor has come from studying three masters: Sargent, Homer and Prendergast. I also had the good luck to grow up in Los Angeles when the California Watercolor Style (as its known) was being widely exhibited, and so my earliest influences would be from the painters in that group.

My main influences as a watercolorist, however, have been oil painters. The group of watercolorists from the California Style were forced to exhibit with oil painters, there being no seperate watercolor shows at that time, and so these artists chose to give their paintings the strength necessary to openly compete visually against an oil. I fully agree with their results and conclusions, there’s no logical reason for watercolors to be vapid and wispy.... and so I’ve turned to oil painters for most of my inspiration.

I have, over the years, exhibited an occasional painting in watercolor shows, but nothing worth noting. I’ve steered clear of the juried exhibitions, as I don’t feel art is something you do in order to be judged by someone else, much less a group of them! So my only real exhibition history as a painter starts in Tucson with the Borealis Arts Gallery.

In the 1980’s, the painter, and my life-long friend William E. Elston, gave me a sheet of 1919 Whatman handmade English watercolor paper. This started a long process of investigating my materials, and led to the purchase of a major stock of old handmade papers from Whatman, J. B. Green, RWS and R. de Bas. Fortunately, I still have a fair quantity of these great papers, and use them from time to time as a subject seems right for them. My current favorite contemporary paper is a Czech product from a mill started in the 16th Century.

I find the interaction between the paper, the brush and the paint to be of extreme importance, and I’m constantly trying out new stuff looking for improvements.

I find most of my fellow watercolorists have little to no interest in their materials, using whatever their locale supply store or Internet chain supplies. I have little understanding for this. Being an artist, regardless of your medium, is a life-long process. The only way to improve is to work more and to spend time understanding what it is you’ve just done. There is no retirement as such, which is perhaps the best part of the whole thing.