Love gets under our skin, it’s where we come together. Paint got under my skin, it was love at first sight. Love will hurt. We lived in the Canadian forest when I was a kid. And that forest got under my skin. It was in my first painting when I was four. I wasn’t allowed to paint at home, too messy, so, I painted it elsewhere. Someone threw it out by day’s end, but I still remember that roaring fire in my ear as I painted.
I was smitten.

Then there’s water, a lifelong love. It’s primal and personal. I bought my first water front property in my twenties. The rhythms of water, mist and ice have a hold on me, can’t look away. I think I would have lost something if I had formally studied art.

Knowing how to make art always felt normal. I doubt if that can be taught. The rest grows out of an insatiable appetite. It’s a long walk from the creative part of the brain to the frontal cortex. Explaining  it might puncture something and drain the magic.

So far, each era of my work has rolled out into the next. Before I began painting, I was an illustrator and art director for a decade. That discipline was a good preparation, and a clear but bumpy point of departure. Illustration and art direction are about unreasonable deadlines and clients. Painting can be embarrassingly personal, and it isn’t done until it feels right. Different planets.

Suddenly, after many years of painting, circumstances flung me into making a feature film. It felt like home. After watching just a few work-in-progress scenes, one viewer said, You know this is monumental”.

A number of people said it changed the way they see things. The former Chairman of the Toronto International Film Festival, Allen Karp, said that this film creates a whole new genre.

A few years into the film project I resumed painting. Everything had changed when I wasn’t looking. Wayne Jeffrey, the conductor, said the new paintings had become symphonies. They have grown into one part of The Beggars Banquet Project. Early risers see things differently, they know that first indigo light. It’s a private time. They’re not there for the light, they own the day.

The water, mist and ice are my characters, in this true myth. The Beggars Banquet Project is a response to darknesses. These paintings and the film complement each other. They are two parts of a longer, broader creative arc.
One art — two mediums.

That’s the background and the foreground, I’m in the middle,  held in aesthetic arrest. So, there’s my changing portrait. It’s never static; the film grows, the paint flows, they come
together in The Beggars Banquet Project.
       Stay hungry.

As for the customary bio details, my work exposes far more skin than they would dare.