I think my first serious interest in art was awakened in the mid 70’s, with the work of Roger Dean, initially through his album covers for Yes and Uriah Heep, but especially through his book Views, which really opened my eyes to a different way of looking at painting, and to the joy of experimenting with things like marbling oil paint over water and working with and around the random aspects of that particular technique. This, in combination with the storytelling aspects picked up from a childhood spent in the world of Marvel Comics, and a great love of many of the great painters & illustrators down through the years, most notably the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Waterhouse and Burne-Jones, as well as Maxfield Parrish and Alphonse Mucha, became the strange brew that fuels what I do today. My biggest outside source of inspiration has always been music, probably an inherited product of my mother’s lifelong love of classical music. When my family emigrated form Germany when I was three, she took all of her opera records with her, and at least once a year we still go to at least one or two performances together. I think the movie Fantasia also had a profound effect on me in terms of the concept of reinterpreting one form of art through another.

I currently live in the Middle of Nowhere in Central Washington State, USA, with my wonderful wife Allyson and our equally wonderful son Laurent. Ally & I met in Art school in the mid-eighties and after both graduating and getting married we promptly moved out to the country and began a series of family businesses, including designing aquariums and building & running a miniature golf course & restaurant. At the moment I'm working at a graphic design studio doing all manner of interesting things from designing logos to making specialty boxes, and on the weekends retranslating those various influences mentioned above into these odd pictures that you see here.