Since my early years of painting Native Americans and horses in the Washington DC area, people asked me why I didn’t move “out West”. After my first trip to Santa Fe to authenticate a Rance Hood painting I found in a thrift store I knew I had to end up in the southwest someday, and all of my most influential artists lived and worked there as well. Long story short after a rekindled romance got me most of the way across the country to Wisconsin, where my work took on the Northwoods esthetic, an opportunity to move to Phoenix was irresistible. The Sonoran Desert immediately felt like home and my work is just starting to evolve with our new home. Since day one here I fell in love with the Saguaro cactus and I started a “portrait series” that got me back out into the Plein Air mode. Desert life struggles and fights to survive and the beauty of that struggle and that life force is what drives my work now. We recently bought a house with a studio in Ajo near the border and this is where I plan to live and work until I can’t do either.