Dude's Bio

Welcome to the lab! Let's see what's on the slab! It appears to be another oil painting incorporating fabulous lyrical stokes of light, shade and colour!

I'm in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, where I was born and raised and lived most of my life.

I began drawing a lot at age four, mostly dogs, wolves and the war and outer space scenes typically done by lads of my era. (I was born in 1958.) I was quite taken with the illustration in books I saw in school from ages six to twelve. The books had prosaic-but-effective Dick and Jane imagery but also lots of wonderful fantasy illustration. That era was a heyday of North American print illustration so it was quite inspiring. Illustrators then usually combined the disciplined drawing skill of the old world with the expressionism and looseness of the new.

I was smitten with the imagery coming out of Disney in the 1960's and with the art in Mad Magazine, Hot Rod Cartoons and the New Yorker. I loved the big New Yorker cartoon annuals found at my grandparents' house. The caricaturist Mort Drucker and car artist Dave Deal are gods to me. The Sixties were a great flowering of colour and innovation in all things visual after the somewhat stuffy 1950s. Even television became available in colour!

I think there's high value in the work of the famous, historically important artists but my biggest influences come from popular culture such as TV, magazines, posters, movies and, most of all advertising. I think the style I'm developing toward could be labelled baroque impressionism, combining the expressiveness of impressionism with the advertising-dominated (i.e. baroque-style-messaging) consumerist culture I grew up in.

I was wildlife-crazy when I was a teen. This was during the beginning of the back-to-nature era. Humanity had finally broken free of the harshness of living close to nature but had lost some of its soul and, being a young person not burned out by life, I became a nature worshipper. I thought about being a wildlife artist but I liked city life and creature comforts too much to do that. (I'm a Taurus.)

I lived in Toronto when I was twenty to do a year at the illustrious Ontario College of Art. It was, and probably still is, a fabulous place to learn about art. The new, upgraded Emily Carr College of Art opened on Granville Island in Vancouver the following year, so I went there and loved it. 

I then made a living as a layout artist and sometime logo designer and illustrator for various entrepreneurs and magazines in Vancouver and Victoria.

I learned to paint, off and on, over the years but got distracted toward the new field of digital painting and all the wondrous images one can make with computer drawing and painting programs. Digital images can be reproduced directly to print and making images doesn't require the many more hours required to master using paints. I started a business selling canvas prints of my digitally-drawn landscapes but I wound up doing much more marketing than art so I changed direction recently and now create just one-of-a-kind paintings, mostly in oil, for one-of-a-kind people, like yourself perhaps.