I work two ways, the first being the most common approach to art: what I see is what I draw or paint.  However, I never try to apply the realistic approach, to duplicate what I see.  My philosophy is: Why copy reality?  Reality can speak for itself.  Reality does its own art perfectly, so why bother? 

My aim is to bring the internal to what I see, the feeling it gives me, the movement and psychology of it, whether it is a static object like a screwdriver, or a natural subject like a tree or the human body.  Both are alive to me, and the life of it, not the precision of every component, is what I aim to create. 

The other approach is more improvisational. I do not plan or sketch out the piece,  and use no external subject at all. Rather I use what impulses arise in me so that any ideas are then free to emerge on their own, to deliver themselves from my unconscious unfettered, unbiased and immediate. I have learned that the unconscious mind carries immense creative momentum. I find nature is far more meaningful when filtered through that realm, and form and message come through in the most startling ways.   

Often I start out with a single brushstroke and see where it leads me, and usually very intricate shapes occur where line, mass, color and pattern play off of each other in an almost baroque fashion. Other times I let loads of paint and oil sweep over the canvas and see what shapes appear, guiding it only by moving the whole canvas side to side, capturing shapes I like, eliminating those I don’t. These I call my “flow” pieces.  

After the work is done, I study it and come to understand what ideas I have depicted. In that sense, my approach is backwards. The subject matter appears afterward, when the piece is done, but always what happens in my inner life always dominates the road to completion.