My portraits and my process are a communion of sorts. I want to help each subject see his or her dignity as participants in the grand human journey. To help them envision their own ideal self. To help them see the divinity within, or even to embrace their inner demons. I want them to see themselves as part of history unfolding.

And along those lines, I enjoy using old grainy black & white photographs as reference material, and reading between the lines so to speak to see who is there. One of the things I like to offer is to take people’s old family photos and breathe new life into them through paint.

My techniques have evolved organically over decades. Unlike buon fresco where the paint is applied to wet plaster I let it dry before I start. So I guess what I do is called fresco secco with many various forms of pigment.The reason I do this is to surrender a degree of control to the materials, similar perhaps to the way a watercolorist uses the paper to absorb the pigment in its own way at that unique moment.