Biography

Following high school graduation, invited by Arthur Lismer, I spent a year studying art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School where I learned to draw. I completed my formal art training at Mount Allison University.

Following graduation in 1956 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, I was employed by CBC TV as a graphics artist. Working in television, I learned to translate stories and ideas into images and connect to an audience.

By 1990, after a decade of exhibiting realistic paintings every two years in a prestigious Toronto gallery, I realized I didn’t want to remain a production artist and chose instead to make a life in art.

Living near the ocean and observing the ever-changing place where water meets sky, the horizon became symbolic in my search for clarity in life and in making art. I explored this elusive space in 25 large paintings. The HORIZON PAINTINGS were exhibited at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 1995.

Other exhibitions followed. Each addressed questions about the vagaries of a life—whether articulating autobiography in IN TRANSIT, or retelling, as a child of the war dead, the story of a largely forgotten WWII battle in THE LIRI VALLEY PAINTINGS.

Watercolours of luscious fruit arranged with decorative tableware evolved into SPECTRA, an exhibition of realistic and abstract paintings focusing on the transcendent qualities of colour.

TREES FOR LIFE was premiered at the University of New Brunswick in 2021 and exhibited in 2025 at The Museum of Natural History in Halifax, and explored the major species of trees in Eastern Canada’s Acadian–Abenaki Forest, its history, and uncertain future in a time of global warming.

Making art has become a meditation on life and an attempt to bring some optimism and order into a messy world. As a visual artist, I continue to believe that art is a means of connecting.