Just over twenty years ago, I was living in Zürich in a beautiful apartment overlooking the city and the Zürich “Sea,” with the Alps just off to our left and sunsets stretching across a copper roof deck. I was engaged at the time (a long story for another day), and one evening while we were watching the sunset, my fiancée turned to me and said, “We should paint.”

Since we (meaning she) had just finished furnishing this gorgeous two-bedroom apartment, I assumed she meant repainting the walls. So I asked her.
“No,” she said, “we should get some oil and canvas and paint!”

She was wildly enthusiastic about the idea of the two of us becoming Swiss artists, or whatever she had in mind, so we went out, bought canvas and paints, and that’s how I started experimenting with putting color on canvas and trying to make it look like something other than mud.

And mud is exactly what those first paintings looked like. I had no idea what I was doing — how to move paint around, how to blend colors, how to keep everything from turning into the same brownish disaster. But over time I figured out just enough to create things I didn’t hate.

Then someone at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center asked if I’d consider doing a show in the long, tall, beautifully lit hallway of their main atrium. Six months and twenty-four paintings later, I somehow had a full show on the wall. Crazy.

People immediately began saying “you should go bigger.” I had no idea how, but eventually I bought some large canvases and tried again. Working with oil at that scale is difficult, scary, smelly, and takes forever to dry — and I had a cat — so after that adventure I switched to acrylics. Huge canvases, lots of experimenting, lots of color, and it all became a lot of fun.

Next up came the question: “I really like that — can you do it in black and white?”
If you really like it, why are you asking for something totally different? But I tried it anyway and ended up with a completely different style that people seemed to enjoy, and a handful of commissions followed.

Eventually I started playing with acrylic pours — on large canvases, on old window frames, even on a rusted Model-T door — and the paint flows were born. Also a lot of fun.

I’m not sure what’s next, but I’m looking forward to finding out right along with all of you.