I find the source and inspiration for my art through my senses. I respond creatively to the things I see and remember. I like best to paint the reality before me; a model, a still life, a landscape, an interior. Visual reality doesn’t bind me. Frequently, I choose to distort or alter my perception of the image I am viewing to increase aesthetic interest. But making art is best and most exciting when I work from three dimensional real life. I also work from photographs, sometimes images I find in books, magazines and newspapers, sometime images I myself have photographed. Often, I use images from various sources and combine them tocreate a composition on canvas.

But there are times when something I see impresses me and I have no means to record it at the time. In that case, I work from memory. This is much more difficult because memory is incomplete. For example, if I see two people sharing a meal, I usually fail to notice the details of their environment. So when I paint the scene I have to resort to my imagination to fill in the atmosphere of the picture. I find that my psychologically most profound paintings usually originate with my response to paint I’ve smeared randomly on the canvas. In those brush strokes I find a suggestion of an image and as I develop it, it reveals itself to me in fuller and fuller detail.