I've always done art as long as I can remember, but it was in Paris in 1961, at the age of 7, when I remember consciously thinking of myself as an artist and thinking of it as a career. I had seen artists setting up temporary stalls along the Seine to sell their work. So I decide to set up my own show on a table in the lobby of the hotel we were staying at in Paris. I sold my first picture, a Paris scene done with markers for about 50 cents. During a visit to the Louvre I stood before the huge painting by Delacroix, "Death of Sardanapalus" and it impressed on my young mind right there how grand and epic and soul-stirring art could really be. And I've aspired to that sort of ideal ever since, now 57 years later, through a life of being known as "that artist guy" in school, a BFA in painting at the Philadelphia College of Art, and an unbroken art career since then.
My goal as a landscape painter is still to produce things that are epic and soul stirring. And I've sought that through the views from the summits of mountains looking down. This vast and epic sort of view has earned me a moniker of the "Plein-air Artist of Thin Air", also the name of a short documentary of me painting on location.
