My most enjoyable and vivid memory as a child, was a trip to the Sequoia Redwood forest with my parents. I was both stunned and enamored the moment I looked into that forest. The giant redwoods towered over a sea of dense, soft ferns, which went on as far as the eye could see. And there were shafts of soft sunlight penetrating the redwoods and highlighting the ferns below here and there. At that exact moment, I fell in love with nature. To me, that forest appeared as Heaven on Earth actualized, and I have carried those images with me perpetually, from that day forward. 

I've never seen anything that could even begin to compete with the beauty I saw there, nor experienced anything that has had that degree of emotional impact on me. I am sure that that strong childhood impression accounts for all the years I spent directly involved with some form of nature, while going through school, working in or managing nurseries, and then ultimately opening my own nursery and landscape design business. I realized later, that designing with plants, for me, was a useful vehicle (an introduction if you will), into the  fine art field, since it encompassed both the aesthetics inherent in nature, with the discipline of a formalized design.  

During the last twenty plus years, I expanded my design business to include, potentially the most highly aesthetic, most refined discipline there is in the landscaping business--Rockformation Sculptures. It was one day, in the middle of designing a strata rockformation, that I had a major realization: that the same elements I had learned to apply when designing rockformations, with respect to balance, color, shape and form, carried over into paintings, without the slightest variance. My actual resolve to seriously pursue the fine arts field didn't occur until a few years ago, when someone asked me to sell them my first painting. 

If I were to describe what drives me as an artist, and my philosophy of art, I would say anything other than a bold, emphatic statement would be abhorrent to me, and further, I want to use subject matter that is relevant and recognizable to us as humans. It should be uplifting, and balanced to the eye. Fine art should command our attention when we walk into a room, otherwise it is relegated to the status of just another element in the decor, and no more relevant than a lamp or chair. Art is aesthetics, and aesthetics potentially can have a significant affect on us, just like that Redwood forest had on me, and from which, I'll never be the same.