Since I had no academic training in art, I studied art books and taught myself to paint. I had no voice of my own, so I copied the Impressionists and Post Impressionists. I worked hard and got better over time, but I found that it brought me little joy. I was envious of the Abstract Expressionist artists I saw around North Beach in San Francisco. It was their passion and freedom of both lifestyle and painting technique that appealed to me.

I took many years off from painting to do life. When I returned to it, I determined to do work that came out of my need for self expression and not to imitate historical models. I began to unlearn what I had learned about painting and tried to paint as a child and a primitive. I found the passion and freedom I was so envious of by rendering my raw, crude figures, scratching them into heavily impastoed surfaces and using splashes and drips. I try to imbue each figure I paint with some characteristic which is recognizable and hopefully, will evoke an emotional response with the viewer.