Having been raised in the parched Arizona desert, I naturally developed a desperate passion for marine biology. Not only did sea creatures carry on in a precious liquid, they were bizarre alien beings letting me share their planet.



Picture books were just about the only way I could get a look at these strange life forms. One thing let to another and soon I was learning about insects, reptiles, anything that could reproduce and requited water. I studied mollusks in particular with a fervor quite inappropriate for my age.



I might mention here that my father, who taught me how to pet bees, was an antique dealer and always had a lot of strange art around the house. There were paintings and engravings suitable for museums and thrift stores that suggested fantastic narratives that were maddeningly incomplete.



Years later as I pursued my bachelor’s degree in Biology (Marine emphasis) I became obsessed first with black and white photography, then with etching and lithography. It was becoming clear to me that I was attracted to the life sciences for aesthetic reasons, as well as all the amazing gee-whiz facts and half-truths that went along with them: Hummingbirds travel vast distances by hitching rides beneath the wings of migrating geese! A pronghorn’s vision is so sharp that it can see the rings of Saturn! Or not!



After completing a couple of printmaking degrees I began to paint for want of a press. I’ve gotten pretty good at acrylic. And I still get a visceral thrill from the discovery and visual reporting of new types of organisms and their modes of survival, real or not.



I like to call my work “Invented Natural History”. Its look owes a lot to my fondness for earlier styles of depicting animals, particularly the copperplate engravings that illustrated Buffon’s Natural History (begun in 1766) as well as Victorian animal portraiture and old scientific illustration.



With my own images I have tried to present similarly earnest, but basically inaccurate, renderings of animals and their habits by using humor, irony and a surrealistic sensibility not available to the scientist. What I want most is to impart to the viewer a sense of wonder and strangeness that nature photography and video, in spite of their inherent capacity for precision, cannot.



While I am considered a fine artist, my work obviously lends itself well to illustration. I would certainly consider making images for use with such media as CD cover art, magazine illustration, and books for children.