As a very small child I would sit on the balcony of our home and look at the moon and stars. I loved the mystery of what I saw and the distance from which that magic was being generated especially when the elements spoke. The rain and thunder and lightning were magic to my young mind. It was as if I were a small planet, who was for the first time conscious of its connection with nature and the cosmos. Accordingly my first painting was of a planet and the cosmos itself. The essential poetry in nature further came to me in mid-adolescence when I spent my 16th birthday in the woods gazing at a tree and was able to really see for the first time... the roots that went so deep into the ground, the branches which stemmed from the main trunk, the rough bark it had developed as a means of protection... and how growing in New England forced it to change with the seasons.

Since those childhood epiphanies I have continued to learn from the forms found in nature and almost in equal measure have coupled that to an ongoing fascination with anthropology, and the writings of Carl Jung who speaks about the collective unconscious and how our instinctive archetypes come into being.

Art historian Rebekah Smick has written about my work and likened it to Rumi. She said, for the thirteenth century Sufi mystic Rumi, this capacity to capture the ineffable is the essence of the poetic. It is, in his words, the human sighting of the divinely inspired dance of life that resides in our souls. In a world that technologically is increasingly separating people from the natural I continue to study nature and remain attached to the profundity of our basic human roots. Teaching children for most of my adult life has helped to reinforce this.