In all mediums, it is people and character that most interest me. I come to know a face through the impulse to record what I see and the visual introspection that happens when moving back and forth between subjects and my reactions to them.

As the writer is not fully content until an experience is put into words, I feel restlessly absorbed until I have put down a mark or line that catches something essential in the person I see in front of me. I "write" with whatever is at hand: pastels, charcoal stick, pencils, acrylic paint, ink, and crayon. The sticks of pastel, pencil, and crayon are for line, which I find so beautiful and important in capturing the structure of an image. The paint and ink are for mood, tone and dimension. Though many of my visual statements are done in a mixture of mediums, I think of some as drawings and some as paintings.

I record what I see so I can view it on paper or canvas, and then "read" back what I have seen. Although I begin with a likeness as a point of departure, I do not dwell on literal reproduction. Snagged by the slightest shift from a literal toward a personal, perhaps idiosyncratic, interpretation of my image, I want to follow the path of least resistance, but at the same time, to stay with my initial inspiration. The tension between these two inclinations fixes my attention and gives new insights into my subject. In this process, I discover recorded perceptions and a subjective sense of my subject that lay outside awareness until the artwork shows me what I have seen and experienced.

A portrait subject comes to be a companion for the time we are "working together." After our time with each other, I know something more of who this person is to me - what emotion, experience, or idea it is that his or her image prompts me to express.

My artwork is in several ways indebted to the medium of photography. A number of the works are based on photographs I have taken of relatives, acquaintances and strangers. The portraits of famous individuals are often inspired by small, black and white news photos that are not in themselves noteworthy artistic statements. Additionally, these artworks share some of the mystery of the photographic process, in that photography requires a negative - the antithesis of the subject being recorded - in order to achieve a finished work. In my renderings, I utilize the consciously noticed to reveal that which may be visible but not always perceived.

My subjects range from family members for whom I have a range of intense feelings to famous people who have achieved the status of icons in the arts, politics, or mass media. I use these artworks to talk about an experience of someone or something, as well as of myself. There is patent delight in having created something new. In this work, I am privileged to explore beauty as a dimension that organizes human experience.