I paint the places I’ve been and the sights I’ve seen.  I grew up camping most summer weekends, sometimes in remote areas of the province, and I developed a love for our great Canadian landscape and its variety of trees, rocks and bodies of water.  It’s these elements that inspire me to capture Canada’s beauty on canvas.  Although largely self taught, I have been helped by many great Canadian artists including Gordon Harrison, Philip Craig and Marissa Sweet. 

I started out painting in acrylics at a local community center and was asked to join a group of artists, now known as the Sweet Art Group of Artistis (SAGA), to share ideas and painting approaches.  It wasn’t until I took a course with renowned Canadian Landscape artist Gordon Harrison, that I fell in love with oil paints and I haven’t looked back. I use oil for all my paintings and generally use a gallery canvas that I wash and block in with acrylics and ink.  My favourite part of the creative process is the initial sketch I do on the canvas.  While many artists forego this step and directly apply paint, I find the sketching process allows me to move from a photo to canvas and select the elements I want to include in the painting. I find this stage to be the most intimate of the end-to-end process and I often leave the sketched canvases for long periods of time to enjoy before the paint is applied.

My hope is that my art reminds people of childhood places visited, fun filled family vacations or favourite peaceful moments alone hiking or canoeing.  I’m a true believer that everyone should own an original piece of art, no matter how small, how simple or how inexpensive.  Having an original piece of art, created with love from someone’s hands that captures a thought, a feeling or a moment in time allows us to escape to our memories or our thoughts each time we look at it.  It brings the great Canadian outdoors inside our homes and our lives. ​