Biography

The idyllic summers of my childhood in Vermont’s Green Mountains gave me a lifelong love of the outdoors and a deep admiration of nature and wildlife. As if in a Norman Rockwell painting, with my fishing pole, inner tube and a Prince Albert can of worms, I spent the long hot days drifting the North Branch back home from some carefully chosen upstream spot. The river, lazily meandering through farms and fields, revealed the secret flow of life and led me to new encounters with wildlife at every turn. Often, my silent approach would go unnoticed and I would get a glimpse of nature not commonly seen. At day’s end my family would listen in fascination as I told of my adventures.

Some of my earliest inspirations in art came when an elder friend and fishing companion hired me to work on his dairy farm. Paintings and sculpture depicting wildlife graced the walls and every corner of his study. I always looked forward to the days when he would indulge my growing curiosity with another peek into his art collection.

That curiosity has never waned. It has taken me in search of inspiring subjects and new techniques throughout the lower forty-eight states and Canada, and overseas to the Far East. My studies of woodcarving techniques in China, Japan, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma have led me to remote hill tribe villages whose extraordinary artisans have enriched my life and art.

Learning in the 1970s of the Pacific Northwest with its abundant wildlife, vast wilderness landscapes, and year-round snow-covered mountains, I set out to travel new roads. While on a fishing trip in Oregon I discovered Sisters to be the perfect place to build my studio. The Cascade mountains, the arid climate and a good supply of hardwoods close by in the Willamette valley drew me to settle here in 1978. Since that time, though career and travel occasionally take me afield, I have made the Oregon high desert my home in life as in art.