For me, there was never a path to navigate life that did not include making images.  I think in pictures and dream in visual metaphor.  Painting, with its untapped reservoir of posibilites, allows me the fullest and most authentic form of expression.  Early in my art education I realized that concepts of raw experience, lessons from nature, spiritual expression and personal belief could be made tangible through the medium of paint.  

Everything starts as intuition and feeling, as the first line to a story.  When I paint, especially in those early layers, I often close my eyes and let my hands dance over the canvas, feeling out where the story travels.  I think about "getting out of my own way" and try to really intuit guttural notions of color and form.  The process of color, followed by abstraction, followed by recognizable imagery, followed by my own code of symbolic mark making allows me to explore new angles of understanding and expression, previously hidden.  I may begin with that first line of story by sweeping a broad arc of blue paint across a blank canvas, but it is in the building of layers that I learn the fullness of meaning.