A short biography

I was born in the self-styled 'magic' city of Middlesboro, Eastern Kentucky, in the center of a meteor crater.  An aunt yet fearfully tells of that cold, snowy morning in early March of 1947.  During my first 18 years I visited myself upon an unsuspecting family and an innocent community called Noetown.
That pastoral place, in that time and space, will always color the work I will do.

At the age of twelve I thought I might become an artist.  I had no understanding as to what that was for there were none in the community.  Instead I learned to whistle and to whittle.  At sixteen the bug bit again.  I signed my first drawing on May 31, 1963. I remember the date but not the subject matter.  While the drawing appears to be lost, it may, like an unruly child, come home again.

Upon graduation from high school I enlisted in the military, I thought everybody did, I signed for four years.  For me it was the forgotten Cold War and the isolated listening post.  I served in the US Army Security Agency as a Russian linguist, helped man TUSLOGDET4 on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, and helped keep the world from global thermonuclear war.  Julius Caesar loved it there when he was a young legionnaire.  The town's name says so - on an old Russian map collection I found it to be Caesar Felicit Sinope.  The old Greek philosopher, Diogenes, was born there and, however unfortunate it may be, I drank of the same water.  After Turkey I was assigned to NSA, aka No Such Agency, at Ft. Meade, Md. until my discharge in July, 1969.

Post military it was marriage, work, college, and work in that rapid-fire order.
Marriage was to my high school sweetheart, a former math teacher.
We have one daughter who has taken her masters degree in Creative Writing.
Work was at Trust Company Bank in Atlanta (later to be Suntrust Bank)
College had to wait six months while I qualified for state residency.

College was at Georgia State University where I took a BVA - Bachelor of Visual Arts, a professional level degree with two thirds of the required course work mandated to be within the degree field.  To keep GI Bill funding at the maximum I took many more courses than were strictly required.  Course work was primarily in Drawing and Painting but also in Print Making, Ceramics and Art History.  In Art History my courses included two general surveys of Western European art and in-depth studies for each century from the Renaissance thru the 20th Century.  I augmented these with self interest in American Art.

I worked in the computer field on mainframes and managed to make a career of it with twenty-three years at Suntrust Bank and ten years as a consultant/installer for Unisys Corp.  Thirty-three years of being on call, as they say, 24/7.

My two worlds of Art and Work never mixed and by 1981 I had stopped doing artwork altogether.  
After my daughter was born I left the bank and traveled for Unisys Corporation installing and upgrading mainframe financial computer applications.  400,000 miles on Delta alone in eight years meant a lot of hotel rooms for weeks on end.  During that time I worked and slept in 27 states for a week or more per trip.  

In 1987 I began to carry art supplies and retrained myself in those hotels all across the country from the deserted beaches of Delaware in winter to the not so deserted ones of California and Waikiki.  I lost the dream on the north shore of Oahu where I committed a typical tourist error and left my art kit in the rental car while I went down onto the beach.  The car was broken into, my traveling studio stolen and my attempt at a career change was essentially gone. I had a showing at the now defunct River Gallery in Norcross, Ga. in 1990.  The gallery closed soon after.  With my foolish error and the gallery owner's bad economic luck my world of Art and my world of Work still could not co-exist.  At the dawn of the PC era I tried to satisfy myself with PC graphics manipulations - Corel Draw on a 286 processor with 2 megabytes of memory - slow but I learned.  Since 1993 I've stayed a step behind in the PC revolution by building my own desktops from second-hand motherboards and scavenged parts.

After escaping many a down-sizing I left Unisys and returned to the bank which had grown much larger in my absence.  There I once again programmed mainframe Cobol computer applications.  Another company, another down-sizing and I found myself retired at the end of September, 2003.  

Since that time I have built a basement studio space, designed and engineered my large equipment and otherwise endeavored to relearn the manual artistic skills that I had allowed to fade.  I knew the road already, I seem to take it on a ten year cycle.  I allowed myself from three to five years in coming to a level at which I could be reasonably satisfied.  In the Spring of 2008 I had my work accepted and exhibited in my first ever submission to a juried show.

My own work is primarily in the traditions of Realism.  In the mid 1800's a loose knit group of painters in the New York and New England area became known as the Hudson River School.  They dealt with the effects of light in a general style known as luminism.  My 'style' is closer to that American art movement. It is different from French Impressionism in that Impressionism was based upon a spurious theory of how the colors in light interacted stemming mainly from the experiments of Newton with his prisms.  The term and references to Impressionism within current artistic output are in the main erroneous.

I am conversant with all the 'abstract' art movements of the 20th century from Picasso and Braque's Cubism to de Kooning and Pollack's Abstract Expressionism.  

In a museum I'm always amongst old friends.  I don't have a single favorite master but rather have favorites by period, century or art movement.  They are all painters who were also great draftsmen.  They are all now dead but the products of their hands will live until humankind disappears entirely.  A few are known only as Anonymous.  

The first are those anonymous artists who drew wonderful things at Chavet Pont du 'Arc cave 35,000 years ago - just 15,000 years after Cro-Magnon man had migrated out of Africa.  Another drew the first cityscape at Catal Huyuk some 13,000 years ago complete with the erupting volcano that dates the work.  We, as a species, had barely learned to speak and settle down a bit when the skilled artist first showed his hand.

So much for history.
Tomorrow is another day with a painting in progress on the easel and a sketchbook in my hand.