ARTIST STATEMENT
While I spent most of my working life as an architect, returning to my first love, art, was not a major reinvention of my aspirations and goals. A basic need to make things has always been my driving force. It could be a building, a set of shelves, a garden, a prairie, a painting or a woodblock print. Buildings are almost always a collaboration among many people, however, I've learned over the years that my personality is geared toward more solitary pursuits, and I like to have both the control and the burden of being the sole creator of what I make. So, artwork has proved to be more fulfilling for me than architecture.
The places to which people can attach meaning are often a city, a town, or a special street or building. But they can also be a natural landscape, Or, they can be those places where the "man made" and "natural" interact, like the way a rural road or intersection is laid across a natural landscape. So one could say the subject of my artwork is "place", or those places which have a special sensory memory or significance for me. We have all had the experience of being touched by art and so I strive to connect to viewers through a visual representation of "place" that is at once specific and yet through each individual viewer's memory connotes a sense of place that has meaning in their own lives.
One by-product of my architectural career was the restoration of an 1854 stone farmhouse north of Galena, Illinois. Set in the rolling hills of the Driftless Region, the rural location of woods, farm fields, prairie, country roads and my own garden are the inspiration for many of my paintings and woodblock prints. SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2017 Small is Beautiful, group show, Galena Center for the Arts, Galena, IL 2017 Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI 2017 Watercolor USA 2017, Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO 2016 Watercolor Wisconsin, Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI 2016 Water and Wood, solo exhibition, Ballweg Gallery, Goodman Community Center, Madison, WI 2015 Watercolor Wisconsin 2015, Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI 2015 Outside the Lines Art Gallery, Dubuque, IA, 2015 11th Annual Regional Juried Exhibition, Freeport Art Museum, IL 2014 Out of the Woods, Contemporary Woodblock Prints, Guenzel Gallery, Peninsula School of Arts, Fish Creek, WI 2014 Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, MO 2013 Biennial Juried Exhibition, Dubuque Art Museum, Dubuque, IA 2011 Award—Watercolor Wisconsin, Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI EDUCATION 1970: MFA Painting, University of Notre Dame 1984: MA Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign