I enjoy working with graphical softwares, but for me they are editing and promotional tools. Nothing will replace the feel of creating with my own hands. I persevered with the arts, specializing in my first love, the Mammals. Mammals were the first concepts ever to appear from the creative hand of man, on the cave walls of pre-history. They are our fellow kin on this planet, with an emotional range not possessed by any other creature besides ourselves, and I find them endlessly fascinating.

 
I have been a professional artist for over twenty years. After studying three years at the Ontario College of Art & Design, I provided editorial illustration for a long list of individual and corporate clients across North America, Europe and the Middle East. In the 1980's the art of fine, hand painted illustration came under fire from cheaper, faster, computer generated commercial imagery. On one hand, it put further pressure on an industry that had reached its zenith in the time of Norman Rockwell. On the other hand, the very best illustration survived and reclaimed its status as an indespensible tool of modern communications. The pundit's denigration of "just illustration" only displays their own ignorance of the history and creative and technical skills of the first art form that ever was.

My commercial experience has givrn me excellent training in drawing and design, which the contemporary fine arts appears to have forgotten. Drawing is not simply an exercise in copying photographic reference or static models, requiring no particular knowledge of the subject. A photograph cannot provide true colour or information in the round of a figure in action. For me drawing is the foundation of any realist art form, is the source of learning for the artist and the universal language for communicating, whether of commercial messages s or aesthetic ideas.

For the past thirty years I have been involved in training and showing purebred German shepherd dogs under the Shawlein prefix, and now participate in schutzhund, a highly demanding sport for working dogs. I have found that this interaction provides an unsurpassed opportunity for intimate observation of animal athletes, their structure, movement and behaviour. Working with a beautifully trained, highly driven dog demands a level of cooperation and gestural communication that is nothing short of magical.