"One day in the late ‘80’s I went downtown to paint the beautiful cityscapes of Oklahoma City, but there, in its shadows, I found the Homeless. They became my subjects. It was as if the Lord was looking back at me through their eyes. I could not turn away. For the next 3 decades, I recorded their poverty and misfortune, while realizing my own good fortune. We are all created in God’s image.
When I was a 10-year-old kid on my way to buy some candy I saw a store window displaying a pocket-size book about the Renaissance artist Botticelli. I walked in and I was hypnotized. I brought that book instead of candy, and took it home and started drawing from it.
I couldn’t quite get my mind around it in the beginning because my eyes were telling me something other than what my pencil was doing. The painter is a prisoner of two dimensions, oil or watercolor on a flat canvas. For more than a half-century I have worked within that structure in order to break free from it. If you combine multiple surfaces, bend and break them, you can give a bigger jump to your figures. You feel like you can pick them up or be there. I call it, ‘Being There.'
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I prefer to work from life, using drawings to develop large scale works in oil on canvas in my studio. Urban Oklahoma City has a wealth of interesting scenes along with unique and colorful personalities from which to draw inspiration.
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My large scale pieces, like the street scene from the old Deep Deuce District in Oklahoma City, are designed to walk into. Walking into a life-size portrait is something people can only accomplish by being there."