My Story

A way of coping grew into a life’s work.

I was a loner in my own family. The youngest of five kids, with a five-year gap in age to my closest sibling, I was too young to play with the others. Drawing became my coping mechanism. I could get lost for hours creating an imaginary world, a place where stick figures could enjoy the life I wanted to be living.

Art got me into trouble early. At age four, I found a box of crayons in my sister’s bedroom and made the wall opposite her bed my first art installation. Working from instinct, I scribbled random colors across the white surface. This artwork (or tagging) was immediately cleaned off by my mother and appreciated by no one.

My parents knew little about art. My mother was a homemaker, my father a steel worker. Neither could nurture my budding skills, but they enjoyed looking at my drawings. To encourage me, Dad brought home stacks of paper from the mill with steel-processing data on the front and clean white paper on the back. Most of my artwork as a kid is on this paper.

Childhood Drawing

Stick figures evolved into cartoons, and then into race cars, and then anything and everything. By the time I graduated high school, I had put in well over the 10,000 hours of time one needs to become competent at a skill.

It never occurred to me to go to art school or seek out formal training, and how this skill might be applied as an adult, I had no idea or plan.

At age 19, I began a Forest Gump-like journey where random moments turned into life-changing inflection points. A tiny want ad in the local paper turned into a job as a draftsman in a design firm, which then led to studying Landscape Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, which then turned into a 30+ year career in design. I was paying a mortgage with my drawing and design skills (remarkable to me at the time), and then became a partner in a private firm, in charge of design.

Still, I was happiest when drawing. Luckily, most of the architects I worked with couldn’t draw (they were all on AutoCAD), and had me do the freehand drawings and sketches for them. Looking back, half of my career as a Landscape Architect was doing architectural illustration — making art — and I loved it.

Plan Rendering for J. Paul Getty Museum
Much of my career was making drawings like this

Into my thirties I started to feel a desire to teach. Again, seemingly random events turned into opportunities. Within a year of forming the idea, I was teaching in the Environmental Design School at Cal Poly Pomona, and soon after at UCLA, and Art Center.

From the start I saw teaching as similar to making art — as a craft. By seeing it in this way, I enjoyed everything about it — from the lesson planning, to the lectures, to the demonstrations. I especially enjoyed working with students, who later became colleagues and friends

It didn’t take long to notice that something was changing in me — I was enjoying the classroom more than sitting at a drafting table. I decided to leave the firm to pursue teaching and making art full-time.

More random moments led to life changes. A chance meeting with a student who was struggling to learn drawing inspired in me a new way to teach drawing. I then turned this method into a class, which then evolved into a book (Sketching - from Square One to Trafalgar Square). The book became a text for art and design programs throughout the U.S., and then found its way into museum bookstores. Museums then brought me in to teach the ideas to the broader public, which then expanded to traveling across the US and Europe to teach drawing and painting.

All the while I continued making art. I fell in love with watercolor and it became an addiction. I resolved to put all other mediums away and committed myself fully to watercolor and drawing (read my approach to making art here).

Today, I draw and paint and share what I’ve learned over 50 years of doing it. I make art most days in my studio in Sierra Madre, CA, teach classes at The Huntington and Norton Simon Museum, and conduct online classes in drawing and painting.

Art has been my life’s work. “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man” (attributed to Aristotle). What started as a way of coping with loneliness became a way of connecting with others, making a living, and appreciating the beauty of the world that you and I share.