I often say that at times I feel like I am living in one of my paintings.  The line that exists between reality and the way I depict it in my work seem to blur sometimes, especially when the light is extraordinary or color contrasts are heightened.  I am drawn to my current surroundings so much that at times it is overwhelming.  I have lived in various different environments in my adult life, and my cumulative history has impacted my visual experience and my work greatly. I started out in Southern California and was literally soaking in that bright light for years- from cities to suburbs, coast to hills.  I also lived in the Bay Area for a number of years and even my subtle moves between three countries have influenced me.  It took these experiences for me to finally understand that it is the visual poetry that exists in my various living environments that keeps me excited to draw and paint. 

Lately it has been the marshes and waterways of the Sacramento Delta and the ever changing landscape of the wine country and the coastal regions just west of Solano County that have captured my creative heart and soul.  The marshlands can be endlessly flat vistas and consist of nothing more than the compact vegetation, water and sky, but to me they are as beautiful as the most lush landscape or natural or manmade garden I have experienced and chronicled in my work.

Soft pastel is my medium of choice.  Nothing compares to those pigments to achieve the rich color that suits me and the spontaneity they provide.  I  like to push color to the edge of realism.  Actually I have always been interested in dream imagery-that heightened sense of reality that is experienced in that rare lucid dream of in moments of pure transcendence.  When I am in the process of extracting and recording the subtle brilliance that vibrates within the composition that I am depicting in my work i go to a place where our world is but a mirror of an inexplicably extraordinary place that exists somewhere else and everywhere at the same time.  This is what propels me.