About the Artist
“Because water’s blue”, I replied.
“Is it?” he queried. “Look at the photo. Do you see any blue in the water?”
At that moment, I realized that color is reflected light – not just in water, but in everything. I saw that painting could be a means to explore the nature of light, as well as the nature of our human experience through sight. In my final year of high school, I decided to become an artist.
That didn’t quite work out. I attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill my freshman year – and loved the school – but in a fit of adolescent hubris decided the art department didn’t meet my standards. I told my parents I wanted to attend art school, specifically Rhode Island School of Design [RISD]. My mother’s response? “We’re not paying good money for you to get a Bachelor of Fine Arts.” She countered with the idea – it’s amazing what mothers know – that if I got into neighboring Brown University I could take some classes at RISD yet get a more flexible BA from Brown. So I did what she asked, for once . . .
Brown and RISD were fantastic learning environments. I took a number of drawing and painting courses at both schools, but ended up designing an independent major that combined art, psychology, literature, anthropology, and religious studies – particularly Eastern religions. I called my major Symbolization, i.e., how people symbolize their most important cultural and religious experiences. Hey – it was the early 70’s!
Our diplomas were written in Latin, so the poor calligrapher had to come up with a Latin translation for my degree. Hence, my Bachelor’s is in Arte Faciendi Symbolas – The Art of Making Symbols. I liked that, but with such an arcane degree my dear Mom probably thought I should have gone to RISD after all.
Following college, I spent three years pursuing a career as a painter but relied on a succession of day jobs to pay my bills. The most awe-inspiring of those years was spent hitchhiking through Europe and traveling overland on the “Hippie Trail” to India. I drew sketches of people and places the whole way, learning about art and life in great bunches. A year after returning to the States, though, I opted for a more secure career path and pursued another passion – psychology.
Winston Churchill once said, “The Americans will always do the right thing . . . . after they have exhausted all the alternatives”. Being a good American, I applied for the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the University of Maryland from California where I’d talked my way into a job as a group home counselor/mural painter after a failed attempt to enroll in the mural program at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City – but that’s another story.
Following graduate school, I practiced clinical and organizational psychology in my hometown of Frederick, Maryland, for 45 years. It was a wonderful career, though the urge to paint gnawed at me the whole time – relieved only slightly by the 9 or 10 weekend paintings I managed to complete in a given year.
When Covid struck, the shift to working from home afforded more time to paint and I finished a plein air painting each week for the second half of 2020. It was exhilarating. But then I returned to the office and work came flooding in for the final three years of my practice. Painting took a back seat once more.
I retired as a psychologist in January, 2024, which has created the opportunity to devote time and energy to painting. Overall, it’s a joy. But as any serious painter will tell you, it’s an all- consuming, often frustrating pursuit. As the great Paul Cezanne once said, “Painting is damned difficult . . . you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t”. And if that’s true for Cezanne, just imagine what it’s like for us mortals.
With that, it’s “game on”. I’ll be posting paintings as I complete them, some for sale and some just to share. Sharing is one of life’s most important acts, so to share what we love is a true joy. That’s the spirit I hope to convey when “making symbols”. I hope you enjoy the paintings.
* I believe in keeping the memory of great teachers alive.