BIO

I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and graduated from Captain Shreve High School. I completed a degree in fine arts from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. The fantasy realist painter Donald Roller Wilson was my painting teacher at the U of A. Roller taught me the foundations of traditional oil painting.

During my early twenties, I developed my own style of photo-realism doing portraits and scenes depicting oilfield workers in northern Louisiana.

After I graduated in 1976 I moved toward bronze sculpture casting and was admitted as an apprentice to the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture in Princeton, New Jersey. For the next few years I focused on bronze casting and mold-making and in 1979 I built and managed a small sculpture foundry on the shore of Lake Bistineau in northwest Louisiana.

A few years later I discovered computer graphics and film-making and spent fifteen years as a computer animator and visual effects artist. I trained as a film actor with Lou Diamond Phillips and Adam Roarke at Adam Roarke’s Film Actors Lab in Dallas, Texas and continued my interest in film acting and film directing with  after moving to the west coast.  I directed a music video for country music stars Brooks and Dunn in 1993 and supervised visual effects work for several major Hollywood productions. I was a senior visual effects artist and creature animator in feature films including Star Wars: The Insurrection, An American Werewolf in Paris, Paulie, and Spawn, working in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara for a number of years.

In 2001, I was co-founder of an internet-based software company that was a casualty of the Dot-com crash. This experience precipitated my exit from the world of computer graphics and feature films and I shifted my interest toward residential construction. I operated as a general contractor in the Santa Barbara area for over ten years and continue to do construction and general contracting in Twisp, Washington. I live a few miles outside of Twisp, along Beaver Creek, in the beautiful Methow Valley.

For many years, I neglected my interest in painting mostly due to the attention of my career in computer animation, visual effects, and exclusive residential remodeling. In 2015 I rekindled my focus on oil painting.