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I was born in Sault Ste. Marie, northern Ontario, Canada on November 8, 1952. My formal training was in advertising art, but my real love was for fine art. My skills in this art form are thus self-taught.
I began work in watercolor, but soon became obsessed with the simple graphic strength of black white, and the intricacies of pencil technique. I take great pleasure in the effort to portray the fluidity and grace of the human form. It is difficult enough to capture a physical likeness in this subject, but this in itself would be emptiness if one did not also reveal the character and expression in each face and gesture, the 'feel' of each texture and the looseness in relaxed muscle as opposed the tightness in flexed muscle. These things breathe life into the flesh.
I am humbled by the beauty and complexity of the natural world, sharing this love of God's creation with the classical artists. I do not feel limited by what some think of as the 'constraints' of this reality. Quite the opposite is true, for no world of human imagination or invention could ever equal the one we have been freely given. Ten thousand lifetimes would still leave an infinite variety of possibilities remaining to be explored. An artist's greatest ambition should be the revelation of this beauty for all to fully enjoy, through the perception and talent he has been given. Skills are learned but talent is a blessing. While it is true that feelings are considered abstract, it is also true that they are felt and conveyed through the reality of the circumstances through which they are experienced. There is no practical way to express them apart from this reference point of reality. Reality is full of detail, and detail is information. The more information we have the greater understanding we have. It is for these reasons that I have chosen high realism as my art form, believing it to be the most direct and communicable means of artistic self-expression. It is precisely because this art form is so easily interpreted that error can so readily be found, but to seek refuge in the ambiguity of abstraction is a price I cannot pay. There is however, a major flaw in most tightly rendered, highly realistic art. It is easy to create a 'free', dynamic, loosely rendered sketch. This is a result of the natural dynamics of incomplete line and tone. The eye working with the brain skips about to join and fill in the incomplete, thus creating dynamics through movement, freeing the simple sketch of 'static' stiffness. On the other hand, in tightly rendered, fully complete art, it is quite easy and even natural for this energy to be lost, leading to stiff, static, 'frozen' form. It became imperative that I should overcome my art form's greatest inherent weakness. Considerable thought led me to conclude the problem lay in the very 'weightiness' of line and tone itself. My answer became clear. Form must be revealed as if by light itself…shimmering, unbound, weightless! All line had to be eliminated, and tone smoothed to the point where no trace of rough, observable 'penciling' remained. Only then would the shadows represented by those tones become so clear and refined as to create the illusion of being cast in light. An 'inner radiance' results as these effects combine with the light reflecting out from the paper surface freeing the image of the 'weightiness' of penciling. 'Static' stiffness is cast off as form is revealed in the true life-like dynamics of light. Hence the reason for extremely smooth pencil tone. It is a highly time consuming technique - perhaps unmatched elsewhere. However, technique is not the goal in itself, but of far greater importance, it has become the means of making drawings as life-like as humanly possible. |
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