My Story

Once upon a Kansas childhood, I began to seriously train as a poet – I was fifteen when I started to write a poem every day. A few months of this and I began to paint as a way of taking my mind off of language. By the time I was seventeen, I knew that I wanted to make art in San Francisco.

So it goes.

Significant time spent working on ships & working in offices, always painting in my apartment when I was ashore. A bit of college in Flagstaff and Tucson, then on to the Coast Guard & working on larger ships out of Honolulu and Washington, D.C., with substantial stays in Newfoundland and Kodiak, then on to a NOAA ship in Seattle with a substantial stay in Astoria; before returning to college in La Jolla with a little more NOAA ship time off the coast of San Diego – and finally moving to San Francisco in 1986. Painting in my apartment until I moved into my first studio in in the Mission in 1989. About ten years later, I shifted to a studio in SoMa. Now my studio is on Kearny Street on a block that was once part of Manillatown and always part of the narrow cultural slice between Chinatown & the Financial District.

So go I.