Every artist would be a great artist, given the chance to explain himself. – Mark Twain

NATURE – I love the natural world, the sky, the sun, the trees and I think all my works reference back to nature somehow. My respect for nature and animals is not what drove me to draw in the beginning, but it is what I enjoyed most, instinctively; being outdoors. Too bad I paint best indoors.

PAINTERS – Bruce Le Dain used to say that he never met an artist he didn’t like. I feel the same today; I connect well with any artist creating in any medium. It’s the creative process that counts and that drives me; I understand others going through the same construction/deconstruction process. Creatively driven people inspire and motivate me; always have. Bruce was an influence, of course, as a landscape painter, not to mention as thinking, caring human being. I’m also infatuated, as many are, with Picasso and Rodin, but also Van Gogh, J.M.W.Turner, Mark Tansey, Basquiat, Gagnon and Sargent. I’m also very inspired by contemporary Quebec painters such as Samir Sammoun, author of Monet-VanGogh-like masterpieces and Guy Légaré, creator of amazing, misty landscapes of the Bic Park region, Helmut Gransow and Stuart Main.

FILM & MUSIC – Movies (images and sound) are invaluable to me. They’ve helped me find identity and drama in creative work. The list here is big: from Kubrick, to Huston, to Lean, to Leone, Scorsese, Coppola, Brault, Arcand and many others. Movies have been the power in my batteries, always have. I love dramatic, visual stories with strongly felt music; my best paintings are stories trapped down somewhere in the layers of paint.

LEARNING – Learning something in the process is very important. The more I learn, the more I feel I’ve got to put back into a creative work. My education, especially the tough years, working my way through college didn’t seem to be inspiring at the time, just tough, but now in hindsight I know different. At Dawson some of the calculus teachers there showed me how to focus and see clearly through complexity. At McGill professors there, and other students especially, taught me to collaborate, to invigorate my thinking and work through exchange with others, and how to establish a methodology to do so, which is one of the great lessons of life I think. The sketching and painting courses under Gentile Tondino, RCA, often using watercolours and live models - as in the sketch below from that period - are to this day precious, unforgettable experiences.

BOOKS – Most important of all, I have, and do, love books. Through them I have travelled the physical and intellectual world. Words are power. Imagination is everything. Hemingway proved it. So did Faulkner, Sam Sheppard, Lenny Bruce, Abbie Hoffman, J.D.Salinger, Salmon Rushdie, and many others. Books that have special meaning to me are: Consilience, E.O.Wilson; The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand; Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez; Dune and Dune Messiah, Herbert; A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway.

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