Born in Chicago I had an art student life at the American Academy of Art. I paint in oils, work in pen and ink, pastels and watercolors. My realization of myself as an artist of images from my own hand began at the age of five. Images of art in books and on the walls of the Art Institute of Chicago stunned me into a heart-sickness of comprehension of beauty and spirituality in painting and drawing. Intrinsically I have always understood the images were actually my innermost soul, that the art was me and I the art, that God ordained imagination superior to reason in the soul of an artist and that the divine faculty works through the artist’s hand. I think art has an elevating spiritual power in the human heart where spiritual yearning encounters life and death.

Art is a transforming “knowing”. It recreates us. Bach said, “Music recreates the human spirit”. Beethoven wrote, “Anyone who understands my music is saved”. Dostoevsky wrote, “Beauty will save the world”. Goethe said, “Art is no mere amusement to charm the idle or relax the careworn, instead, it is the sister of religion”. I do not address stylish pessimism or postmodern irony. We live in a symbolic world and all events surpass their appearance for our metaphoric world is more than the “real” world. Metaphor is the seed of art. It is the prophetic power in the future of language. I call myself a Modern Symbolist because I employ the metaphor as symbol, not very far from the views of the 19th century Symbolists, and release its non-rational sense of power in my images. All my work concerns everyday life if only the viewer would look to see.

The wonderful 19th century Symbolist French painter, Gustave Moreau, wrote:

What admirable discovery that, the first artist to paint who will have met the eternal eloquence of this silent language, who will have been able to prove, the sublime inventor, the sage, the divine artist, all that man is able to express in the language of symbols, of sign and of myth. O noble poetry of silence, living and passionate, beautiful art that one who, under an enveloping material mirrors physical beauty, equally reflects the great outburst of the soul, spirit, of heart and imagination, and responds to the divine need to be human all the time. It is the language of God.