As a workshop instructor, if my students are to be successful and have a positive experience in the workshop, it is imperative that I include exercises to ‘exorcise’ the ego, and offer strategies for coping with it…

As painters/would-be artists, we need our left brains and egos to plan, learn technique, orchestrate, manage the process while protecting us, and helping us withstand the world.

We need our right brain and our spirit to inform us of aspects beyond the visual field with dreams, symbol and metaphor, and to love life.

Over the years of conducting workshops, I have discovered that it is not enough to teach my students how to see and paint. My students are drawn to my workshops to discover not only how I paint, but they wish to understand why they are effected by the more expressive aspects of the work

I call it “digging for gold”.  What follows are some of the ways we gold miners excavate our art...

It’s time to see how the lighting theory works in charcoal; This time, instead of using temperature and color to delineate planes of light and shadow, we only use value (light and dark).

You never know what you’re going to see on your own front door!  This wonderful Native American was milling about on a parking lot, waiting to join a local parade.  Thank goodness I had my camera!

As you know, my education has been largely self-directed.  In choosing my mentors and teachers, a common denominator has always been their ability to capture life, energy, and emotion, causing me to ‘feel’ life in the work, as much as be visually entertained by it.

Wherever you go… On an airplane, at the hairdresser’s under the dryer, the life you see around you is a miracle. Whilst I do not particularly like being available 24/7 for anyone who knows my number, my smart phone became precious to me when I watched Steve Jobs do a talk about the Brushes app.  Now, I always have something to sketch upon.

Throughout the years I have begun to view the artistic journey as similar across the arts, no matter the media.  I'd like to explain how I’ve witnessed these similarities in how we develop as artists, no matter our media or particular art form.

I feel it extremely valuable for my students to understand that, regardless of race, gender, theology (or lack thereof), country of origin or sexual orientation – in fact all the ways that tend to separate us one from another – we can all come together in some deep, common, perhaps archetypal understanding via the arts.

Regardless of how “real” the subject may be, when you find the abstract shapes in the composition beautifully orchestrated, somehow the painting seems stronger, has more authority, or adds another layer of competency to the overall piece.  

How many of us are afraid to step up and into the dirt, the fear of losing the competition or losing face preventing us from even showing up?  I have yet to meet anyone who aspires to the horse business, or the art business that doesn’t battle these same fears, and yet steps up to the plate anyway, no matter what.