Quick Tour:

Artist's Statement:

I am an artist who creates photo-realistic oil paintings. I've been painting for 27 years now, but it has not gotten any easier. One painting can take as much as 120 hours to complete, not counting the time to varnish and frame it. So why do I work the way I do?

As a teenager I was fortunate to work part-time for a master furniture-restorer. Often I spent my Saturday sanding a table top by hand with sandpaper wrapped around a brick. The boss was a perfectionist who insisted that a top be absolutely flat and blemish-free. He had spent years honing his craft. He was a true artist who could replicate inticate carvings and exactly match the color and sheen of any finish. It was time-consuming work, and required a high degree of skill. But the finished product was amazing, and he was always much in demand.

Ever since then I've admired that kind of uncompromising craftsmanship. That's what I'm after in my art.

My subjects tend to be things that were built the same way: old houses and barns, classic cars and trucks, antique tools. Most are found near my home in southeastern Massachusetts or on Cape Cod. I could travel to Venice to paint the canals, but I would rather discover something scenic about the canals in the cranberry bog down the street. If you can "see the world in a grain of sand" then the best subjects may be waiting in your own backyard.

As for style, I agree with Childe Hassam: "the true impressionism is realism." Two people can look at the same scene and see very different things. Some years ago I did a painting of an abandoned farmhouse, which to me was a melancholy and lonely place. But a viewer told me that he liked it because it reminded her of her grandparents' house. I saw the farmhouse as it was today; she saw what it had been in the past. The painting was able to evoke different emotions because it was a faithful transcription of the actual place. If I had left out little details that hinted at the former charm of the house, that duality would have been lost.

So please browse through the images in the galleries, and see if they awaken any memories for you.