I was born in 1948 in Los Angeles and raised in Fairfax, a small town near San Francisco. I received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987 and a Masters in Fine Art from the University of New Mexico in 1991. Since 1998, my wife and I have resided in Ravenna, Italy.

Two strong influences on my visual art have been music (Baroque, American Jazz, Blues and Regional, traditional and regional music from a variety of cultures) and poetry (classical Greek, Roman, Arabic and 20th c. European and Russian, read in translation). Traditional crafts have also been an influence, along with vernacular architecture.

I have a strong layman’s interest in the sciences and science imagery.

From 1983 until 1990 I was involved in many public art mural projects/commissions. From 1990 until 2010 my wife Stephanie and I completed numerous 1% for Art public art commissions (mosaics) in the US, as Twin Dolphin Mosaics. These and other mosaic works can be seen at www.twindolphinmosaics.com

The following quotation from an address given in Chicago in 1970 by the anthropologist/scientist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), has steadily increased in significance for me:

“If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.”

MATERIALS

• All works use 100% acid free papers.
• All drawings are graphite (2B–8B), most of them using Rives BFK Lightweight, a French printmaking/drawing paper.
• The prints use Japanese rice paper, Italian, German or French printmaking papers.
• The lino prints were done with etching inks.