My earliest memories are of lying under my mom’s easel with a drawing pad of my own.  At age thirteen I began private drawing lessons with an award-winning artist to learn the techniques of the old masters.  The next ten years instilled in me a love of the more traditional styles of art, but there was another side of art that had always fascinated me: the surreal, the melancholic, the blissfully flawed... During church my dad used to draw surreal pictures for me, and as I grew older I started doodling my own.  My drawings on paper somehow always seemed unfinished, like a sketch for something bigger, but the spontaneity of the drawings never carried over very well into paintings.  So I skimmed across the tops of a lot of different styles and mediums, focusing on learning techniques rather than a particular style or subject.

Although I have utilized many styles and mediums over the years, my current work is primarily coloured pencil on thin sheets of birch veneer.  In 2006 I started working on birch and simply fell in love with it. Even a simple pencil drawing takes on a warm and inviting glow when drawn on wood.  I experimented with using different materials, paints, markers, even a wood-burning tool, before settling on coloured pencil.  The waxiness of the coloured pencil on the wood grain creates the most creamy, delicious, rich, velvety texture. The coloured pencil sits on the top of the wood grain, using the texture to give it a natural depth, sometimes even creating an almost holographic image.  The picture seems to move as you move past it; different colours fade in and out, shadows deepen, highlights vanish and then reappear. If you look at some pieces straight on they may look dull and flat, but take one step to either side and suddenly there's a face bursting out of the wood at you.

I strive to bring a natural element into my work, sometimes staining or colouring the wood to accentuate the grain. The movement of the wood grain is utilized in the arrangement the composition, to make it part of the piece and accentuate the organic flow of my work.

My aim is to create art that transforms the darkness of life into something beautiful, that displays its scarred black underbelly yet still somehow evokes feelings of serenity and utter contentment, to combine the elements of sacred symbolism with the imperfections of modern life to portray in a beautiful and physical rendering that which transcends and might inspire us to go beyond what we accept as reality. Some of my inspirations come from classical art, Norse and Celtic mythology, the symbolist and surrealist movements of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the psychedelic art of the 1960’s, and the illustrations in classic children’s books for their ethereal idealism and the way they stir the imagination.  Working with birch veneer, I’m not so concerned with a particular subject or style; my goal is to create work that invites the viewer to look more deeply, into the image, into themselves…

A friend once asked me why I was an artist. The best answer I could come up with was a combination of genetic predisposition, a lifetime of conditioning, and to stay alive... It had never occurred to me that I could be anything else.  If I go without creating something for too long, I get this overwhelming feeling that everything is not okay, that I'm missing a giant part of myself by not painting/drawing/sculpting... It's another way to express what's inside my head, a language that I seem to be more fluent in than English...

"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."