I use the term minimalism for a lack of better term. My preferred term would be reductive painting: a bare-boned formal approach to image making. A formally reductive sensibility has always been at the core of my art making. Growing up and being schooled in Southern California made its mark on me as well. The particular types of minimal art that emerged there, Hard Edge, Finish Fetish, and California Light and Space, were the main influences on my aesthetic. My earliest paintings were influenced by the Hard Edge artists of Los Angeles. My first painting teachers were June Harwood and Fidel Danieli. Film, particularly narrative film and the way stories were told in the cinema also influenced the way I developed my sense of composition. I was enamored with the way images were fragmented and edited together. Through film I was exposed to the modernist ideas that became so important to my development as a painter. In 1976 I moved on to the University of California at Santa Barbara where artists as diverse as Howard Fenton, Howard Warshaw, Doug Edge and Richard Dunlap reinforced this pared-down aesthetic. In graduate school at UC Irvine I studied with Tony DeLap, John Paul Jones, and Craig Kaufmann. The influence of each of these artists further cemented the reductive aspect in my work. Graduate school was a heady time for me. Some of my classmates were Kim Abeles, Jan Derek Taylor, Russ Crotty, Frank Dixon and Mike McGee. We were a highly productive group and the creative atmosphere at that time was intense. What I am showing in this gallery of the web site are mostly art works from the 1970’s to the early 1990’s.