It all started with photography in Texas; for me photography is another way to create images.  My Dad, gave me a 35 mm camera when I was 11, as I was constantly 'borrowing' his good camera whenever I could get my hands on it; when I was 13 I entered my first photography contest.

    Later all through Viet Nam and four years in the military I carried a camera & when I could a small sketch book - both as a way of interpreting what was happening to me and those around me, and to distance myself from it.

    I exhibited photography off and on until I began a career in cinematography and video in the late seventies and received a Master of Art in 1979 from the University of Missouri-KC.  I taught video & film production at Haskell Indian Nations University and later at Northern Illinois University.  By 1986, bored with documentaries and commercial video production and seeking to return to the single image, I started a graduate program in studio art, while keeping my day job of producing educational programs in the arts.   I found myself taking addition course-work in photography and worked with traditional printmakers in video documenting their workshops and classes.

    Upon gaining my MFA, I a took a ‘fun’ course in printmaking, and it was an epiphany in the studio: working the plates, inking, pulling prints transported me out of the normal world and totally into image making.  A wholly different tradition of the single image, a completely new toolset and way of seeing changed my perceptions of what my art was about. This was in 1992, and led to 18 hours of post-grad work with intaglio and relief techniques at Northern Illinois University and elsewhere.  Until this time all my experience with printmaking was in documenting the work of others.

    The core problem with a biography is that one often tries to make one’s life into a coherent story and by doing so the reality of it gets lost or hidden.  So here is some of the incoherence.

    The essence of my life has been change.  As my dad was a US Air Force pilot and later a corporate executive we moved a lot when I was growing up: Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, San Antonio, Texas, then later I lived in San Antonio again, Clovis, New Mexico, Saigon, Tucson, near Sacramento, California, then Missouri, Kansas, Illinois.  Worked in Manilla, Buenos Aires, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Sicily, and so on.  Change and changes.

    As an undergraduate at University of Missouri-Columbia I first majored in Literature - trying to find life’s answers in Dostoyevsky to Nabokov, Euripedes to Pliny, with doses of Thomas Pynchon, Sherwood Anderson, Burroughs [both of them] and Robert A. Heinlein as the principle directions.  None of this explained Viet Nam and what I did there.  However Claude Levi-Strauss led me to another area: culture.