A friend once told me that good writing doesn’t need illustration but benefits from illumination. I’ve tried to heed that good advice as an illustrator, eventually realizing it might, in a sense, apply to the process of painting as well.
I started life in the Hollywood hills, hopped up the California coast and landed in the Bay Area, where I performed, made art, made a son, began a forty year relationship with Zen and then Energy work, all the while finding wilderness in which to walk and looking for wild beings with whom to talk. That’s the story I try to illuminate. The painting occurs from the inside out, and it’s finished when it takes its first breath (that illumination from great painting teacher, Chester Arnold).
There were several opportunities to exhibit work in Los Angeles (I made one exceptionally good three-legged dog for a production of Waiting for Godot). In northern California, I have done set painting, faux design, window displays and prop construction for Edward Martinez Fabrications, but I think the sea-green plumbing insulation costumes for Oblong Rhonda deserve a mention as well. I’ve also done illustration for Publisher’s Design Studio, Studio Arno, Brooks Cole, Addison Wesley, Morgan Kaufman and various businesses. I was an art teacher for seven years at Marin Primary & Middle School and for REAL School Marin.
Exhibits of my work have been at the College of Marin; Sausalito Art Commission; Maison Re, Los Angeles; Throckmorton Theatre, Mill Valley and Youth in Arts, San Rafael. Most recent illustrations have been in publications by Great Works Publishing and in Edward Espe Brown’s by all means –A Zen Cautionary Tale (Missing Links Press, 2014). My paintings are in private collections in San Francisco, Marin County, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, as well as Portland, Oregon, Santa Fe, New York, Germany and Austria.