About Myself
I was born in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1949. My mother, Betty, was a housewife and an excellent artist and my father, Albert, was chief engineer at the local radio station, WAJR. We lived there until my father died in 1959 and my mother moved us to Bradenton, Florida to be near my grandparents.
I graduated from Manatee High School in 1967. I started college as a major in mathematics at Manatee Junior College, changed my major to fine arts and graduated with my AA degree in 1969. On to University of Florida, I majored in painting. My favorite professor was Hiram Williams who I grew to admire. I especially liked his fireside talks on artists. He would tell all sorts of stories and facts about an artist without ever mentioning his/her name. Curiosity sent us scurrying to the library to find out who he was talking about. I had my senior show with my roommate, John Hawver, at Manatee Junior College and graduated in 1971.
Influenced by my draft number and confused about where to go next, I enlisted in the Air Force. Bad eyesight prevented my being an officer, so I asked for medical laboratory assistant. I got computer operator. When it came to picking a place to be assigned, I chose anywhere overseas. I got San Antonio, Kelly Air Force Base, USAF Security Service. In getting my top-secret clearance, I ran a foul of the FBI in stating that I felt China should be part of the UN. I hated the first year but then decided to make the best of it. I managed to meet a lot of fellow artists both in and out of the service and grew to like the experience. I was discharged in 1975.
I moved to Tampa where I met my wife, Gail, doing volunteer work at the Tampa Bay Art Center. She was director of education, and I was hanging exhibitions. I spent two years working on my art, had a one man show, and didn’t sell a thing. I had no success finding a computer job and had run out of unemployment money, so I fell back on the GI Bill to enroll in the Library Science Department of the University of South Florida to get a library master’s degree. My first professional library job was at the Florida Mental Health Institute as a cataloger. There my favorite challenge was putting together a patients’ library which put to use everything I learned at school.
In 1981, I received a job at the Verman Kimbrough Memorial Library at Ringling School of Art in Sarasota where I became the audiovisual services librarian. I built the AV department up from four slide projectors and one TV to a full service department with up-to-date equipment and AV materials for its growing faculty and curriculum. I eventually became responsible for the digital image collection and book collection development for the whole library. My favorite accomplishments while working at Ringling are the building of a comprehensive collection of visuals for the history of illustration, the recognition of the numerous artists working in staff positions through an annual staff exhibition, and the running for many years of the Mary Ellen Lopresti Award for the best art books published in the southeastern United States. I retired from Ringling in 2016 after 35 years.
All my life I have continued to paint, draw, and take photographs. My favorite subject is women’s faces which my friends tease me that they almost always have bangs. Most of my art involves women as the subject. When it comes to influences, I would have to say that I have favorite artworks rather than artists. If I had to choose an artist, it would be Henri Matisse. I have other interests that include model railroading, building plastic model airplanes, collecting studio pottery, collecting 1920s and 1930s license plates, and playing at playing the drums.
My art exhibition resume is minimal as I have only had one one-man show in the 1970s. I have been accepted in very few of the judged competitions I have entered, and galleries continue to tell me that nobody buys pictures of people.
I like to draw women’s faces whether from life, from photos (my own or those of other people), or from memory. I take an interesting face and do my own thing to it.
