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 was not allowed to paint at
home, 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. I bought my first waterfront property in my twenties. The rhythms of water, mist and ice run through this work. They have a hold on me, can’t look away. I think I would have lost something if I had formally studied art.

Making art has always felt normal. The work grows out of that roaring fire and an insatiable appetite. I doubt if that can be taught. 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.

Each era of my work has rolled into the next. Before I began painting, I was an illustrator and art director for some time. Those disciplines were a great preparation, but an absolute point of departure. Art direction and illustration are about unreasonable deadlines and clients. Painting is primal. It leaves room for mystery. It’s often 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 immediately felt like home.

After a screening of just twenty three minutes of work-in-progress scenes, one viewer said, “His film cut me to the core. The dried up parts of my soul, burst open with sharp painful pulses. I was reminded of why I wanted to create art. I felt more alive in that moment than I had in a long time. I walked away with a resolve to create.”

Another viewer said, “I had been given to rather than taken from.” A number of people said that it changed the way they see things.

A few years into the film project I resumed painting. Everything had changed when I wasn’t looking. The new paintings have a larger creative arc that’s symphonic in nature.

The water, the mist and the ice are players that bring gossip of the dawn’s violence out onto this wide stage in this true tale. The film and the collection of paintings are two complementary parts of one art.

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. Nothing much spreads a cloth of glory for the feast.
Stay hungry.

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