In His Own Words

Artist Statement

Walt and Marian’s Farm: Western Edge I 2012
Oil pastel on paper, 40” x 40” matted and framed

Assateague Towards the West I 2014
Oil pastel on paper

I have worked with the subject of landscape virtually all my career as an artist. I lived for almost fifty years in west central Minnesota where the natural scenery varies from open agricultural acres and grassland prairie to the lake region forests and marshlands that have never been cultivated or planted.

In the past few years I have returned to that region to photograph landscape motifs that I process and modify to become suitable images for further development in the media of watercolor or oil pastel. I find it an exciting challenge to represent and interpret a virgin natural scenery, a Midwestern wilderness, that I can compose and transform into landscape. Through my decades of being there I believe I have an intuitive sense of the place to qualify as a native artist now in absentia.

Most recently, I have learned to value the enormous variety and abundance of life on Assateague Island, Maryland as source for landscape motifs. Like the natural scenery of the prairies and forests of western Minnesota, the barrier island environment of Assateague offers a pristine source for landscape specific and special to a place that I am just beginning to explore.