I captured the morning light at a friend's hotel he personally built in San Jose, Guatemala on the north bank of Lake Peten, about an hour away from Tikal.  The palm trees, vines and sunlight on a green wall with a single red flower made for a lovely composition of light.

Pushers and Pullers was born out of admiration for Alex Grey's work of mystical realism and of energy flow in the universe.  The theme here is that all of us are influencing others or being influenced by others, and choices made can change the direction of the universe of experiences, and it is a commentary on our attachment to what matters or not.  And so the influence we exert on each other goes around and back somehow.  The process contains and emits a great deal of energy.

I was commissioned by an art dealer to do a painting for the children's cancer ward in the Mary Bridge Hospital in Portland, Oregon in 2013, and developed this painting as a collage of several different photos of otters found on the internet and composing them as a group as if floating on water.  Capturing the water and its depth was a unique and fun challenge, as was integrating the otters into a believable perspective.

A painting of roses at the end of the street on my block.  The light coming through the petals was so brilliant and lovely I had to capture it by hand.

I was on an otter theme for a while and wanted to do an underwater painting of an otter as a challenge to try achieving the depth of field of being submerged, the play of light on the sand bottom, and a conference of moon snails (left to right): Thai Moon Snail of Asian coasts, the Aleutian Moon Snail of the northern Pacific Ocean and Alaska; and the west coast Moon Snail of the US west coast.  Oceans Kiss is about both the abundance of food for life, and that all waters are connected, and that otters eat sea urchins which eat sea weed and kelp beds.  The challenge of getting the water reflections to work was a lot of fun.

Alfredo Arreguin, a locally famous artist in Seattle and in his home town of Morello, Mexico where he is from, has been a mentor of a style I deeply respect and love, so I aspired to be able to paint in his manner as a way of exploring other potentials I have as an artist.  Completed in honor of his 75th birthday, I had the honor of presenting this portrait of him as an act of thanks and deep respect.