I have always been creative. Born in Texas, I grew up in a small town in northeast Ohio near the shore of Lake Erie. Creative interests - art, music, and photography - were favored parts of my life from an early age. After receiving a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio and a Master's in Operations Research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I settled in New Jersey in 1981 upon accepting a position as a telecommunications analyst with Bell Laboratories. As my time became crowded with the demands and diversions of adult life, I realized that my creative side was not as close to the surface of my life as it had been, and I missed that. So I decided to begin making changes that would ultimately allow me to create art full time. In early 1994, I left Bell Communications Research and immersed myself in painting for more than a year. Now, I balance my time painting in my studios in Oceanport and Mount Holly, teaching abstract painting, and working as a telecommunications systems engineer.

More than a decade ago, I moved away from geometric constructed paintings to painting in the lyrical abstract expressionist style. For me, this has been a way to expand my artistic language and revel in the possibilities of paint. The paintings are "non-representational", meaning they are not meant to portray anything in the world we see around us. They require careful study on the part of the viewer, not just a quick glance. A long look will reveal details, textures, and perhaps the evocation of an object or a landscape.

For several years, my paintings have followed the fundamentally landscape-based abstract expressionist direction pioneered by artists such as Richard Diebenkorn. This has provided me with much inspirational territory. My recent work reflects a growing restlessness with working only in paint. Studying the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, I have begun to explore using collage elements - everything from magazine and newspaper clippings to various found objects - to enrich the painted surface. These recent paintings are less referential to the landscape and more evocative of urban existence. They generally exhibit a large, somewhat centrally located "calm" space surrounded by borders filled with visual activity that is "edgy" and graffiti-like.

In 2007, I opened ABstract EXpressions Contemporary Art Gallery (www.abstractexpressionsgallery.com) in Mount Holly, New Jersey, as a venue for showcasing contemporary abstract art.