About Me

I was four.

I saw the chalk in my father’s lunch kit. I wanted it. It was for Dad’s work and I knew I shouldn’t touch it. It was not mine to use. I took it anyway and headed downstairs.

On tippy-toes, I reached up to make my first mark. The chalk ground into the surface, spattering white dust at my feet. I drew large.

I was an awkward, sensitive kid. I didn’t fit in. Yet I did receive acceptance for my artwork. I could draw and paint and people saw something in that. 

I used to lay on the coulee hills and count the blues in the skies. 

Colour and form comforted me and soothed my overly active mind. Art directed my sensitivities into something productive. It was my way to communicate and it helped me understand the world. 

Growing up in a working-class family, my parents didn’t consider art as a career choice. However, they taught me to work hard and then support myself. 

Art College was humbling. Everyone knew more than I did—art history, techniques, movements, terminology —things I had never heard about. I learned a lot in two years but was too immature to go out on my own. My parents encouraged me to get a teaching degree. In Dad’s words, “You ain’t going to make any money on art – that’s for damn sure.” Teaching would pay the bills.

Teaching was my second love. It brought new adventures all over Alberta. I taught in an isolated indigenous village in the north; in a hardscrabble oil and gas town in central Alberta—a school so tough the teacher I replaced had quit after only a month, and finally in a private Jewish school in Calgary. It was interesting to design different pedagogical approaches to help students learn. At the same time, I always tried to balance my teaching with studio work. Eventually, I stopped teaching school children and became a full-time artist.

For me, painting is a profoundly spiritual and meditative act. 

I love the process of deconstruction and reconstruction. I will destroy an image and then bring it back. I love the nuances that occur in that process. Previous marks and colours are still there—but overshadowed by a stronger idea for the composition. 

My sky paintings are about life and death, about resilience and hope. I can’t help but think of these and other big questions when I am in front of my easel. What is our purpose here? How do we build community and connectedness?

Perhaps together we can do a bit of good while living under these skies.