I'm an artist from Louisiana, in the Deep South of the United States. It is difficult to describe this place as it is very much a place of places. I was born and raised in an old New Orleans of jazz, opera and art and a cultural diversity that met on the neutral grounds of food, music and celebration. Within an hour of the city there were cajun french and zydeco music on the bayou, festivals celebrating bountiful harvests of fresh strawberries, oranges and creole tomatoes. There were Indian pow-wows. There were strolls under moss-laden oak trees on the grounds of antebellum plantations.
The rest of me belonged to the wild places, including the swamps, bayous, marshes and coasts. There I would lose myself in nature. Surrounded by birds, animals and the seemingly endless beauty and variety of the natural world it was hard to imagine that it would someday be threatened or worse, endangered.
Although I have no formal training in art, no one can truly claim to be self-taught. I am immensely grateful to the artists in my life who have shared with me their technical training, their personal avenues of expression and their visions; as well as their many how-to books, canvases and other materials and supplies. Thanks to their support I paint in watercolor, acrylic, oil and mixed media as the spirit moves me. My primary subjects include musicians, flowers, birds and other wildlife, but as you may quickly note I'm not especially fond of "rules" and I express myself liberally through these subjects and media.
I hope you'll join me in celebrating nature and wildlife through the wildlife portraits I have shared here on Artinua. They are portraits more than traditional wildlife art. Through them I hope to convey the nature of these wild, beautiful beings we share our world with. They also serve as vehicles for a more spiritual portraiture of people I have known and human nature in general.
