Workmen and workboats many times fill my mind. The bay offers an honest pay for honest-to-God hard work... a mixture of sweat and pride... pride in self-reliance.

What a terrible - beautiful place is the bay.

I am not a fisherman. I am simply an artist with a sailboat, working at making a living, too.

I paint what tugs emotionally at my hand and mind. I paint many scenes where man and nature have greeted each other in harmony, and have sometimes clashed in disharmony. I paint the things that create interesting designs and a delight to explore the detail up close as well the entirety at a pace or two away.

Rust is particularly interesting: man mines ore, smelts the metal, builds something with it, then abandons it, and nature slowly takes it away. Wood follows a similar pattern. Then there are barnacles holding fast to a rudder, too long waiting to be cleaned. Nature is inexorable and beautiful in its reclamation of things made by the hand of man.

I am becoming more and more fond of expressing that process in paint. I am becoming more and more fascinated with combinations of reflections and shadows on water. Water is visually never the same twice, yet it is always the same. What a challenge.

I take hundreds of photographs as I travel. Photographs freeze a moment in time ready to be thawed and manipulated and refrozen as a painting. Many times a painting can be a combination of several photographs with a dash of healthy imagination thrown into the mix. What an enchantment.

Twenty to a hundred hours are spent on a single one of my paintings. My medium of choice is gouache. Almost all of my color work is gouache. The medium is similar to tempera (an opaque watercolor... used a lot by Andrew Wyeth) and has many moods to employ. Mix it heavily with water and it is transparent, flowing, free. Or, less liquid, it can be opaque and flat-toned. With it one can glaze a color over another, or use woven layers with a dry-brush effect, to give a comfortable sense of stability and solidness. Gouache is, in my opinion, a most magnificent medium. It allows splash. It allows detail. It allows realistic expression. It dries quickly, and it suits my temperament.

Some of my paintings are what I call "broad-stroke studies." I do, from time to time enjoy a looser, freer style. There are times when it just feels good to let go with the larger brushes.

I also render black and white tonal drawings in pencil. Rope is a good subject for pencil. My pencil drawings are for their own sake. Few are done as studies for greater works.

From time to time I do a portrait. I enjoy the change of pace. I like portraits that meld subjects into their environments... into what they like to do: people fishing, sailing their boats, or planting their gardens.

• 2001:   Virginia Beach, VA, Boardwalk Art Show
  
  
• 2000:   Virginia Beach, VA, Boardwalk Art Show
  
  
  Chantilly, VA, American Artworks Festival
  
  
• 1999:   Norfolk, VA, Art Explosion