Born in Pennsylvania, lived in Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Boston and New York. BA from Penn State, graduate work at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, American University, The Corcoran School, and The Georgetown School of Medicine, where I studied human anatomy and spent a year dissecting a full cadaver. It was there that I began to teach life drawing to medical students and personnel. I continued that teaching when I moved to New York. I taught life drawing to balance the dehumanizing aspect of medical training and practice. My first appointment was at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, where I helped Dr, Rita Charon create the visual aspect of the narrative medicine program. I taught there for several decades, and at the NYU School of Medicine, Columbia University post bacc=pre med students, and at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

I have travelled worldwide, visiting cultures that are rich in art but struggling to exist. I have seen many of the wonders of civilization in countries of desperate circumstances. If I can enrich the lives of anyone in these countries, through the embassy programs, I will be satisfied that my work extends to all parts of the world.

It has been said that my work has an immediacy and urgent quality about it. I don’t paint for anyone but myself, so the images come about as personal recordings of meaningful events in my own life. It is my hope that some semblance of universality will affect those who experience whatever I draw and paint.

Music is intrinsic to everything I do, including painting and drawing. I could dance before I could hold a paintbrush. That quality of physical rhythm and energy is basic to any visual imagery that attracts me. Whatever evolves on my drawing paper or painting is affected by danceable music. For me, art originates in the viscera, not in the head.

Anything alive is worthy of attention.

To paraphrase Matisse: “All my life, I have been held by the opinion current at the time I first began to paint, when it was permissable to render observations made from nature.”