When I was a teenager, my father gave me his 35mm camera, and I began wandering around taking pictures of stuff I found interesting at the time. My professional photographer friends thought the images had artistic merit, and the then-emerging Photorealist movement inspired me to try to make paintings from the photos, which I did using gouache and illustration board.

Those early works, while successful (I even made a sale), were put on hold while other life events intervened. In the mid-1990s I began painting again, this time in acrylic on canvas. My impetus was to recreate the early painting that I had sold, and always regretted doing so. I have been painting steadily ever since.

My subject matter is derived (with a few exceptions) from photographs I have taken over the past 40 years. Locations include Southern California, where I have lived since age 12, and places I have visited in my travels in the United States, Mexico and Europe.

Over the years I have come to see my paintings as documents of things looked at but not seen, the ordinary environment that we live in but seldom examine closely. I believe that by close observation, which is necessary to translate source photographs to canvas, I can begin to uncover the grace that is hidden in the things around us. The paintings are my way of bearing witness, and of making people stop what they’re doing and pay attention, to something they may have never seen before, but that makes them feel “I know this.” A young woman who saw my work on display remarked, “You make ordinary things look beautiful.” Yes, that is what I am after, the beauty in ordinary things that reveals itself if we only see.

I am a self-taught artist. I live and work in Costa Mesa, CA.