Welcome!

I want to welcome you to my Studio and blog. In these pages I will bring you into my studio to watch my creative process and to be a part of some of my works in progress. When I look at a piece of art in a gallery or museum I am always fascinated with the technique along with the how and why the artist actually created the work. (the artist in me I guess). Many of my paintings involve dozens of separate layers. So often the original idea I had for a work is far from what the finished painting ends up looking like. I want to share this process with you.

I also want to share with you my inspirations, motivations and passions. I have know since I was seven years old that I wanted to make a difference, that I wanted to contribute somewhere and somehow and that I wanted to be an artist.  (Actually I wanted to be a famous rock star but that dream quickly faded).

I will leave you with a quote from Leo Tolstoy,

“Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications.”

To take the simplest example:

A boy, having experienced, let us say, fear on encountering a wolf, relates that encounter; and, in order to evoke in others the feeling he has experienced, describes himself, his condition before the encounter, the surroundings, the woods, his own lightheartedness, and then the wolf’s appearance, its movements, the distance between himself and the wolf, etc. 

All this, if only the boy, when telling the story, again experiences the feelings he had lived through and infects the hearers and compels them to feel what the narrator had experienced is art.

And just in the same way it is art if a person, having experienced either the fear of suffering or the attraction of enjoyment (whether in reality or in imagination) expresses these feelings on canvas or in marble so that others are infected by them.

And it is also art if a person feels or imagines to himself, feelings of delight, gladness, sorrow, despair, courage, or despondency and the transition from one to another of these feelings, and expresses these feelings by sounds so that the hearers are infected by them and experience them as they were experienced by the composer.”