I was born in Honolulu Hawaii
a few months before that island celebrated statehood in 1958.
The first of four children we moved every two years or so
from California to NJ to PA, back and forth and in-between
before coming to rest for my high school years in Swarthmore, PA.
After graduating in 1976, the bicentennial year,
I still have the class ring with the liberty bell on one side and the minutemen on the other,
I left home to attend Connecticut College in New London.
The only formal art training I have is from my college years,
when I focused mainly on black and white,
finding refuge in pencil drawing and the printmaking process.
I moved to the Boston area after college.
Worked in the Harvard Sq. Coop as a picture framer
and ended up managing their custom-framing department for most of the 80’s.
That era was a heyday for The Coop Print Department, the largest of its kind in the country,
and it was a mecca for artists and art lovers and a magical place
for opening wide the eyes of this particular burgeoning artiste.
It was also during this time that I was invited to visit a friend’s home on Martha’s Vineyard
which began my lifelong love of that island that continues to feed my artistic soul to this day.
Along the way the family reshuffled itself and I was blessed with a new stepfather, Fred, and four more brothers.
When it became clear that Fred was ailing, I left Boston with my best friend Peter Follansbee, and we moved down to Muddy Creek Forks,
a tiny self-contained village in a remote holler of Pennsylvania in order to be closer to my family and to try our hands at traditional woodworking.
We lived for a time in abandoned general store which held post office,
train station and hotel all in the one giant building of the Muddy Creek Forks General Store.
While Peter soon returned to Massachusetts to pursue his career –
he is now a world renowned scholar and expert in seventeenth century joinery –
I spent the next 5 or 6 years working as a traditional chairmaker.
Using only hand tools I made Shaker style ladder-back chairs
and traveled around the country in my little red truck
making the rounds of juried craft shows and museums.
The old crafters joke eventually won out…
What would I do if I won the lottery ?
Keep making chairs until the money runs out !
I can’t count the number of odd jobs that have put bread on the table since then,
but they include farm hand, carpenter, bookbinder, vest maker,
stripper at a three-woman printing company and picture framer off and on for 25 years.
All of which made for interesting detours and each were attempts to make enough money so that I could paint.
My easel has been set up in every one of the 26 places I have lived so far
and by the time I decided to give painting my full time efforts I was well into my early forties.
Those early decades of incubation have brought a sharpness of focus
and have informed my subject matter
as well as the foundation in realism.
My paintings have been described by some as narrative.
I do enjoy a good storyteller
but I begin a painting by listening
to the subject itself.
Studying, in ever deepening detail
the nature of an object,
I learn from its bones and scars what stories it has to tell.
Then I try to tease out the intersections of beauty and mystery
between artist, subject and viewer
and hopefully weave some whimsy in between those brushstrokes.
Most of the objects in my still lifes are discarded
well used and worn, common and familiar
and, like the patina on my Aunt Imy’s old porcelain teacups,
they resonate with the spirits of all the hands which have used and passed them along
and the conversations they each have overheard.
I invite the viewer to come close and explore the detail and,
just as the characters are revealed and the interior brought into focus,
a shadow appears in the wake of someone who has moved through a room,
or a mysterious light glows from within a vessel and pauses your glance
and you are full of new questions.
The ongoing quest is to study and refine the craftsmanship of painting with oil color
and to know when to trust the practiced hand enough
to get out of my own way.
My beloved partner of now over 30 years…
Pat Lackey
… is a hospice nurse
and living with her has taught me that life is short
and far too precious to be doing something less than meaningful work.
With her encouragement and support
I took the leap and had the first solo showing of my artwork in 2001.
The success of that show set me squarely on the path toward my dream of being an artist.
I now paint full time
and divide the work between my log cabin home
with adjoining studio along the Little Conewago Creek in Manchester, PA
and the open studio of Martha’s Vineyard, MA.
I work at my easel happily and gratefully all day, every day
and I do not take one minute for granted.
