Paintings

I received my first set of Chinese watercolors as a Christmas Gift when I was thirteen. I tried oils briefly during my teens and early twenties, but as a detail painter, I found them heavy and hard to manipulate and very slow drying. I also went through a period when I did a lot of portrait work with graphite and colored pencil. But for decades, watercolor remained my favorite medium. For several years I worked as a framer in order to gain a discount on my own framing. But then my employer decided to move the business to the mainland and I could no longer afford the cost of framing, so I went looking for some way to create hangable art work that didn't need frames. I began painting wildlife in acrylic on slabs of stone, using the natural color patterns of the rock as the landscape. Then I inherited a closet full of blank canvases from a friend and began working larger, using an airbrush to get a soft, blurry background. These galleries show some of my favorites in each medium.