The road to learning a new skill is different for each individual. For me, learning to draw and paint started with fun. As a kid I fell in love with comic books. I read them all the time. I brought them to school and traded them with my friends. My best friend and I would draw our favorite characters copied from our collections and the compare them at school the next day. There was no reason to do it except for the pure joy of it. It turns out that I was just good enough at it that I started to get positive reinforcement from my peers and the adults around me. This made it even more enjoyable and I started drawing more. When I got to high school I was delighted to learn that I could take specific classes where I would be doing nothing but drawing. After high school I worked my share of entry level fast food and restaurant jobs but I ultimately started apprenticing at a commercial sign shop. This is about the time that I enrolled in community college and started taking some more serious painting classes. During this time I picked up a lot of really practical knowledge about color. As a sign painter I would often be asked to match very specific colors by our clients and I got a lot of practice that would end up being very applicable when I started painting with oils. In school I was taking classes in color theory and learning all kinds of fascinating things about light and color and in my day job, I was practicing the practical applications of those ideas. Eventually I transferred to a four year university (U.C. Davis) and this, ironically, almost killed my artistic impulse. Although I had the benefit of some very good instruction while I was there, the overall thrust of the fine arts program was very conceptual. There was a huge emphasis on concept and relatively little time spent on craft. I found this to be sort of paralyzing. I felt a lot of pressure to make paintings that addressed some social or historical issue, or to do work that was conceptually cutting edge in some way. Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing work that is ambitious in that way, it just seemed so serious all the time and it sort of discouraged me from painting. After college I painted signs for a couple of more years and then applied for a job teaching art at the continuation high school in.the district where I grew up. It was my sign painting experience that ultimately landed the job for me. The principal was looking for an art teacher with practical, vocational art experience. Most of my students were at-risk and the feeling was that the instruction would be more relevant to them if they could learn some job skills. I ended up doing lots of little drawing and color demonstrations in my classes on discarded scraps of material. This reignited my love of drawing and painting for its own sake. A few years after I started teaching I became aware of the “Painting a Day’ movement spearheaded by Duane Keiser. This seemed like a really doable way to get back into painting without feeling a lot of pressure to create great works of art. I had already been doing lots of small pieces to demonstrate concepts to my students so it wasn’t a big stretch to shoot for completing a small painting every day after school or on my lunch break. It turns out that making small paintings was kind of addictive and I just stuck with it. I paint every day and finish at least one small painting every day. I think that kind of discipline suits my disposition and I enjoy working small and focussing on very specific and basic formal ideas in my work. I feel like I’ve improved the most since I started painting regularly and looking back I wish I’d had this insight into my character and disposition years ago. I spent a lot of time wondering WHAT to paint when I should have just gotten to work and painted whatever I wanted to!

I was a high School art teacher for twenty-three years. I spent all of my time teaching beginners the basics of drawing and painting and I feel like I am very much in tune with the concerns of the beginning artist. A few years ago I retired early from teaching when my district closed the school I was working at for financial reasons. My art sales were going well so I decided the time was right to try something new. Painting full time is great but I really missed teaching so I started doing some workshops locally. I did this for about a year and I really enjoyed it and then the pandemic struck and I was unable to meet with students. Luckily for me, my wife is also a teacher and her district adapted to doing online classes very quickly and she encouraged me to start looking into some remote teaching options. It’s actually been the best thing for me in terms of teaching. I now essentially have the whole world as a client base rather that just the people who can travel to a physical location for a day class. I’d been teaching online classes for a couple of years when I was approached by Page Street Publishing to write a beginner’s book on oil painting. It was actually perfect timing because I was able to use many of the ideas regarding theory and practice that I’d been developing with my students. The “Beginner’s Guide to Oil Painting” came out a couple of months ago and I’m very happy with it. I think it offers a way into the complex world of oil painting without overwhelming the student. I tried to outline some practical ideas that would help beginners develop a good foundation while seeing some early success with their work. I think it’s important for beginners to have those successes because frustration is rarely encouraging! I continue to teach online classes out of my Northern California studio that focus on the beginning to intermediate painter.

As an artist, I of course want to share my work, but I am also very committed to helping beginning painters unlock the joy that painting can bring to their lives. Describing the world through drawing and painting is an incredibly powerful thing to do but most people give up on it because they don’t have the basic tools to achieve a level of success that would encourage them to continue. Our educational system rightly values math and English skills. Students are exposed to math and English from kindergarten through high school graduation but most people stop being exposed to drawing by about the third or fourth grade. This is why most adults draw at about a third-grade level. I found this to be true of my high school kids as well. Most of them were so self-conscious about their lack of skill that it was very difficult to get them to even attempt to do anything. It became my goal to give them some very simple skills that would enable them to achieve some early success so that they would have the confidence and desire to continue to evolve artistically. The idea that creativity can be self-perpetuating once and artist is hitting closer to where they’re aiming continues to drive me.

There are many resources available to artists today that weren’t around when I was in art school. The internet was in its infancy so things like YouTube, where you can call up any kind of painting tutorial on demand and for free, didn’t exist. Social media wasn’t around so the ability for artists to share their work and push each other was limited to print and in-person venues. If an artist wanted to see a masterwork up-close they would have to travel to the gallery or museum where that piece was housed. I don’t think that there’s ever going to be a replacement for seeing work in-person, but Getty Images is pretty good! It would be easy to wish that I had access to all of these amazing innovations earlier in my career but I have to say that the one thing that I wish I’d had is much more basic than that. I wish I’d had a greater belief in my own ability to learn and evolve. I had some really good teachers who tried to tell me that an artist needs to put in the work but with me, it didn’t really sink in until I just reached a point where I was frustrated with my own level of performance. When I finally committed to painting every-day I started to see very incremental but steady improvement. Sometimes it seems glacially slow but I usually manage to find some positive glimmer in what I’m working on and that’s enough to keep me moving forward. In short, looking back I don’t wish for some external resource, I just wish I’d started sooner!