About
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983 with a BA in English and then from Boston University in 1988 with a MA in Creative Writing, I taught English in Boston area independent schools and colleges for over 35 years, finding a long-standing position at Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, MA where I taught and coached for 24 years.
Moving away from my primary training and interest in writing, I started painting 15 years ago, taking classes at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In addition to several Vineyard shows, I have also shown and sold my work at the Zullo Gallery in Medfield, MA and at the Mother Brook Arts and Community Center Open Studios in Dedham, MA. I live in West Roxbury, MA with my supportive wife, Karen, our wonderful daughter, Mya, and our two dogs, Tayo and Leroy.
Since retiring from teaching in 2023, I have had more time to paint, write, and walk the dogs. This makes me very happy.
Most of my paintings begin with an emotional attachment to the place I am painting. They could be places I return to time and time again—certain meadows, paths, and coves on Martha’s Vineyard or one-time adventures out West or as far away as Kenya. I work from photographs that I have taken, photographs that capture light and shadow in interesting or moving ways. That’s the feeling part.
The next part is about looking, about the intense visual focus on the lights and darks before me. What am I really seeing? Not a pond, but a yellow streak of light here and a purple one there, a swoop of maroon shadow down here. It is a kind of focus that is hard to come by in a busy life, and yet when it happens, the clutter just goes away and time stops. Sometimes paintings worth looking at emerge; sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, I start again, with another layer of paint, knowing that that failed first layer beneath may very well emerge in some cool and unexpected ways in the next iteration. I have to push against the impulse to be literal. I know that when I start picking smaller and smaller brushes to recreate things exactly as they appear in the photograph, I am going down a disappointing path. Emily Dickinson, in a poem that seems to describe what she thinks about writing poetry, expresses a similar idea: Tell All the Truth/But Tell it Slant. Clearly, I have trouble letting go of the English teacher that I was. But sometimes, when I am using big brushes, gobs of paint, layers of failures, and a certain slant of light, I can be a painter, too.