About Me
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The day I was born, Adolph Hitler was about a month away from being appointed Chancellor of Germany, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just become President-elect of the United States. That was December 1932, and |
| millions of innocent people were being savaged by a Great Depression. My parents and |
| I lived about thirty miles north of Boston MA on a chunk of granite called Cape Ann, an island really when both bridges were up. The place housed two artists’ colonies. One was in Gloucester, at Rocky Neck, and the other was at Bearskin Neck | |
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in Rockport, on the north end of the cape. During the summer months, you couldn’t wander very far without tripping over someone at an easel. In the late forties, Gloucester High School had an active Fine Arts Program. I feel I should mention it, |
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because within that program were some of the most valuable and formative |
| events of my life as an artist. My teacher was a big man named Howard Curtis, whose large hands and resemblance to Boris Karloff made his vocation as an artist/teacher seem incongruous. A childhood accident had left him with impaired vision, but he always reminded us that he was not blind in one eye, but rather someone with monocular vision, which, he insisted, gave him all he needed to execute a painting on a two dimensional surface. Mr. Curtis empowered his students to develop whatever creativity they possessed, and if someone showed promise, Mr. |
| Curtis insisted they actually work at it. He made the idea of becoming an artist acceptable at a time when it was still largely frowned upon as a vocation for a man. He gave me a solid grounding in the intellectual tools an artist must learn to wield, things like perspective, color theory, elements of design, form and lighting, etc. Experience and maturity would come later. Even today I see him as the most important influence on my early development as an artist. He set things in motion. Next came three years at the School of Practical Art, a commercial art school in Boston, where I started to learn about the tools of what would become my trade. I gained an inkling of what editorial and advertising illustration was about, and I was made aware of the level of quality and service that would be required if I intended to make a career of it. I have many fond memories of that time. |
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| I joined the U.S. Army at the end of school, and, after basic training, had the immense good fortune to be sent to Austria, where I spent two years in Salzburg as the illustrator in a four man Engineer Intelligence Detachment. Upon implementation of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, I was reassigned to Italy for six months. When separated from active duty in 1956, I reentered art school for a year’s refresher course, and then embarked on a forty-two year career as a freelance illustrator/Designer and frequent painter of paintings. Painting satisfied a need that illustration never could. |
| For me, the seventies constituted a divide between two distinctly different lives. The two biggest decisions of my life were taken in the seventies, and both worked out quite well. I met and married Maryse, a young woman whose name was as lovely as she was. Originally from Quebec, she was a complete Francophone until the age of eighteen, but, by the time our paths crossed in Boston some ten years later, she was completely bilingual, and virtually without an accent. When I first met her I had no idea she was not a native of Massachusetts. |
| In February 1975, on what turned out to be the last of a series of exploratory trips, I came out to Vancouver. At Maryse’s suggestion, it had been added to the cities on which we performed what research we could in the Boston Public Library. As Vancouver began to sound better and better, we decided that I should come out and actually talk to people and lay eyes on the place. Three days after arriving, I called Maryse and told her she could start packing. It actually took until late November, 1977 before we could finally get away. We then stuffed everything we owned into a rented moving truck, hitched our car to it, and, like a one-wagon wagon train, headed out across the continent. It was the best decision I/we ever made, and returning has never been a consideration, or a desire. |
| Along the way I becamea member of Boston’s Copley Society, the Boston Art Directors’ Club, New York's Society of Illustrators, and BC’s North Shore Artists’Guild; pursued advanced studies with Murray Wentworth, ANA, AWS; Larry Webster, AWS; and Phil Hicken, a pioneer in serigraphy; and visited the Republic of Vietnam for the U.S. Army and Air Force as a participant in their Civilian Combat Artist Programs. The resulting paintings and sketches now reside in the U.S. Defense Department’s Office of Military History. |
| My work appears in private and corporate collections, domestically and internationally. |