I have been encouraged and aided by many people during my career as a painter.  My mother first expressed appreciation for my efforts to make pictures, and by the time I had graduated from Pomona College in 1959, the difference between making pictures and painting had become clear to me. 

My interest in art was stimulated by my studies of art history, philosophy, and classics.  My interests in painting were stimulated by the work of the abstract expressionists, the German expressionists, and Mondrian.  A class in early Netherlandish painting, taught with singular intensity and wonderful intelligence by the art historian and artist Teresa Zezzos Fulton, had a great impact on my emerging visual sensibilities.

After receiving an M.A. in art history at Harvard, I spent three years in Mexico City where I painted full-time and exhibited.  During these years I explored certain classic Greek mythological themes.  My interest in mythology as a visual framework for thought and feeling was intensified by the two years I spent as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, from 1967 to 1969.  Dualism, metamorphosis, the confrontation of opposites, the struggle for achievement, the ultimate failure of an heroic effort - each of these gestures is expressed in the myths I use.  My effort is to translate these gestures into abstract visual terms and pass their energy on to the viewer.