I was born in Portland, Oregon. I attended the Burnley School of Professional Art in Seattle Washington, as well as the Portland Art Museum School. The Burnley School was later sold and became the Art Institute of Seattle. The Museum School is now the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

My choice of subject matter and my use of color are certainly influenced by the "Northwest School" - the name later given to a group of artists that worked in the late 1930s and 40s in the Pacific Northwest. They had in common an interest in the muted colors and occasional intensities of the Northwest landscape, and some were attracted to both the art and philosophical influence of the East. Guy Anderson, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan, and Mark Tobey were the most well-known, achieving international reputations. William Cumming, the youngest of the group, was my figure drawing teacher at Burnley. He is the only one of the group still living. If I were to identify myself with any "school" of art at all, that would be it. I believe, though, that it is the northwest itself which has formed my visual sensibility, just as it did theirs.

Other influences include Mark Rothko, the late work by George Inness, and Paul Lehr.

The painters I admire tend to be more suggestive than explicit.