About me

I am an artist who loves painting people in their natural and cultural environments. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been learning about the world and its inhabitants through writing and drawing.

The strong impulse to absorb, interpret, then share my perceptions resulted over the years in a career in the humanities, two books on cultural history and communication, and lots of articles on subjects ranging from public speaking to poetry. Then, during my last seven years as a university professor, I researched and wrote a book about the religious traditions of deaf people around the world. Spending so much time thinking about the souls of deaf people flipped a switch in my brain, and now all the time I once spent writing is devoted to making art.

I am a studied realist, especially when painting individual people, but the spaces around people in my works are another story. Here the contexts of cultural tradition, art history, and interior contemplation interact with my subject in intuitive ways. Sometimes I convey a classical sense of three-dimensional depth; other times I play with contrasts in artistic style and combine different depictions of space to evoke imagination and the interior life.

An interesting fact about me is that I was born with strabismus, a condition that limits depth perception but endows me with the surprising ability to control each eye independently. I recently began vision therapy to help my brain learn the new-to-me skill of seeing the world in a more unified, harmonious field of vision. The physical artifacts of vision training–red/green glasses, induced double vision, awareness of my body’s psychological midline–are becoming new avenues for exploration in my work.