I grow my art rather than make it. Even as a child, growing up in North Andover, I would dig up clay by the river and form figures, paint the walls of the barn crazy colors using rollers. I’d go to the library when I was really little and look at art books. I loved Hieronymus Bosch because his paintings were really funny, and there were naked women.

I didn't know any artists growing up. I am dyslexic and had a hard time in academics. When my high school guidance counselor asked if I was interested in art, I said no and joined the Navy. But when we were in port in Greece, Italy and Spain, I went to all the museums and galleries. I loved Gaudi and particularly Miro because of his humor. His images were happy, his colors bright.
When I got out of the service, I went to art school in Boston. I was introduced to the Abstract Expressionists and drawn to Gorky, Kandinsky, erotic art, indigenous cave drawing, and automatic writing, but when one of my professors gave us the assignment “create your own world,” I began to develop my own style, my own organic process, to play around with the rules and improvise.

When I’m working, I get lost in inner and outer space, working from random to deliberate. As I get older, I realize there is no time, only the moment. I try to stay awake and aware and give my intuition all the space it needs. It’s a process parallel to life: you make mistakes, you correct them and then you go on. But in art, the mistakes give you more choices, open more doors.
I’m also color blind, so I take chances with my palette, looking for the relationships between the colors. Variety, contrast and intuition are what make life interesting, and it's the same in art. I usually pick from all the materials around me. I keep lots of choices so I can just go with my own flow. I just play with the material, keep making marks, until I start seeing things in the process, and the design begins to fall into place. That's when I slow down, or go back later and make the decision whether it’s done or not. Sometimes I’ll keep going--do five or six paintings on the same painting when I don't know when to stop. When it works, each pass back brings in more richness, more texture, I see new shapes and possibilities. When it is challenging, the pauses, stops and starts take the work into a new dimension, a new direction. You have to follow the signs that the painting gives you.

I draw from all experience in my life, from working construction, reading about the body and animals, family friends, other artists’ work. When I see something I wish I had done, that’s when I know it’s good. I used to always start from something from the outside, from art history, or a model, images for a collage, or Asian art, but now it all comes from inside. Any work where the artist put all their love into it--I don’t think it matters if it’s realistic or surreal--it’s when you put all that love into it, that’s what makes real art.

Ultimately, the viewer brings the beauty and value to the art, ideally becoming one with the images, spending time with the work. People see what they want to see. I am often surprised by what I create, and I want the viewer to have a similar experience of astonishment, to feel some balance of contrast, rhythm and the beauty of living and being alive.