How is it possible that I turned into one of those mad artists who stands in front of his easel, palette in hand for eight to ten hours at a time, jumping from one canvas to another to add finishing touches over here and start a new painting over there?  My passion for creating art consumes me.  Though I began painting as a child and had professional instruction in oil painting beginning at age nine, and although I had one painting class while in college, my talent for painting lay dormant for a couple of decades.  It took a near fatal fall in the Grand Canyon, plus the personal intervention of the spirit of Vincent van Gogh, to bring me to my senses. 

You see, first I had a career as an author (6 STAR WARS books), TV producer / writer (THE TRANSFORMERS and LIE DETECTOR) and as an award-winning film director-producer of seven independent feature films (four distributed by Universal).  After co-writing and executive producing the Showtime film ROSWELL (with Kyle MacLachlan, Martin Sheen and Dwight Yoakam), I had a disastrous fall while hiking the Grand Canyon, and while I was laid up recovering from multiple fractures, I did nothing but draw for months.  I compiled hundreds of pen-and-ink drawings.  Then when I had fully recovered, I directed a film I wrote called STARRY NIGHT, a fantasy in which Vincent van Gogh returns to life in our time and discovers he wasn’t a failure after all and that his work is now worth a few billion dollars.

Obsessed with Vincent and his paintings, I began creating paintings from that stack of pen-and-ink drawings – dozens of representational oil paintings on many subjects, in many locations, beginning in 1999.  Dozens turned into hundreds, and then came experiments (and even collaboration) with all sorts of materials adhered to canvas before the painting begins. 

The art I create is representational, and I have not been involved (yet) in the realm of pure abstraction.  However, my conception of representational art is infused with abstractions as I never try to literally convey the reality the eye sees.  Rather, I lend a personal interpretation to my subjects with attitudes that range from compassion to whimsy.  “Follow the light source,” is the motto that applies to most of my recent work.  Unlike the minimalist movement that often strips art of all signs of emotion, my art is usually filled with signs of emotion and attitude.  I am a colorist but also committed to the style of having brush strokes – the very ways in which paint is applied – play a role in telling the story and defining the images.