Greetings and Salutations!

The year was 1991, I was 14 and my family moved from Southern California to Olympia, Washington. This was a foreign place for me, I remember driving around this heavily treed place, dripping wet with rain and seeing hippies! What?! Hippies! Or “Greeners” as they were known to us. Olympia was a small and very liberal town.  With the trees, rain, mountains and hippies came artisans, craftspeople, a wonderful and wild emerging alternative rock scene that had us all fixated and heavy doses of creative vibe. Yep, Nirvana played in Olympia bringing this new genre of music we had never heard before. Everyone from jocks to hippies were listening to it. The pace was slower and people weren’t as fixated on image and celebrity like Southern California. Olympia also had a history in the logging industry and I remember many families living in remote parts of the area barely getting by on timber dollars; dads were lumberjacks. I fell in love with the arts and the outdoors here as well as the simplistic lifestyle; being in nature, backpacking, skiing and could never get over how many trees there were, not to mention raindrops. 

 

This creative current flowed into my high school impacting our art department. One day, I was walking down the hall and I saw all these drawings hanging in the hallway. One after the other, on display. They were remarkable drawings, realistic and I was hooked. I absolutely HAD to learn this as I had been drawing pictures my whole life, but not like this. And so my drawing journey began. The arts were the one place I truly excelled. I went on and majored in drawing and painting in art school and have been drawing ever since. I am always seeking that aesthetic from the precision I saw in the drawings hanging in the hallway so many years ago. I was so blown away by that.

 

Much of my work derives from nature,  experiences in nature as well as in small fleeing moments of a-ha and inspiration much like those small, intense and creative moments I was experiencing in Olympia during the early 90s. In many ways the way in which I was taught to draw during those years still runs strong throughout my work, it’s just stronger now and continues to build.