For me, art is about ideas and expressing those ideas, not taking a photograph with paint. Capturing a philosophy or a mood or a moment of tension or emotion is what I'm after.

Ideas come to me visually, and painting is how it feels most natural for me to communicate my ideas. Painting is also a way for me to connect to other people, like a common language. I like telling a story with painting, and sometimes I like posing a question, a "what if. . . . ?" I often imagine the future, and I like to paint what I imagine.

I love color, and paper, the tools of the work, and I love the paint itself, and I can't imagine devoting myself to anything else. Every time I tried, for practical reasons, to do other things, I wasn't happy. Visual art is something that chose me a long time ago. I love the process of creating, discovering, and I like that creating a picture makes me slow down and enter another world.

Background:

I have painted since I was a kid and now, decades later, I'm branching out into online graphic design. I have a new Wacom Intuos4 tablet that I am using for digital art and I'm designing new things all the time.

I studied art at the University of Minnesota, Moorhead and through a home correspondence course while I was still in high school. I have sold artwork all over the country and through several websites. I'm a completely free-lance artist and have no other job, as this is my devotion, but I also am involved in political and environmental causes because art can't always say everything I want to say.