Biography
Major influences on my work include two years of travel and art/language studies in Europe as a teen-ager and interactions with artists like Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebault, and others who pointed me in a variety of sometimes confusing directions in the course of MFA studies at the University of California in the early 70s. After six years teaching sciences in Rwanda (Central Africa) I moved with my family to Alberta where I have been teaching and painting since 1980.
Artist’s Statement
Sublimation/Exploration
My experience of painting is that it is a form of sublimation – i.e. a means of channeling excess energy, partly sexual no doubt but also existential/religious; yet it is also a means of exploring the tensions that I feel in my own life between the rational and the irrational. Bluntly stated, the interactions among the scientific, artistic, and religious sides of my personality are often far from harmonious and art (including time for reading, reflection etc.) is a ‘sine qua non’ for maintaining peace in the psychic household.
For years I have found similar tensions in the art of medieval Northern Europe (hence my preoccupation with the work of Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, etc.).
More recently, however, I have begun to see that same friction (i.e. between Rational and Irrational, Ego and Id, Apollo and Dionysus) in the art and religion of the late Roman Empire.
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