I'm still a kid. When I go hiking or go to the seashore, I come home with broken seashells, bones, driftwood, feathers, odd stones, and seed pods. I take them home and I try to draw them.  Sometimes when drawing shells, I image new shapes. I began to wonder, "What would a shell with two or three spirals look like?" So I invent "new" seashells. Or I the points and ridges of a weathered seashell might remind me of desert rock formations. So I mentally "uncoil" the shell like a scroll to make a horizontal landscape. 

When I draw from nature, I find structures and details I had not seen before. But the more I see, the more I have to leave out, or the drawing gets too crowded. My art is a mixture of discovering and hiding.

I mostly make etchings. To make an etching, I paint a protective coating on a copper plate. Then I draw on the plate by scratching the coating with a needle, exposing the copper. I put the plate in an etching solution, which etches grooves into the exposed copper. Next I remove the coating. I print the image onto paper using a hand powered press. I may modify the image by etching in more lines or scraping away lines with a scraping tool.

I also make engravings by carving directly into a copper plate or an acrylic plate with a needle or sharp tool called a bruin.

I can make many prints from a plate. I can make the prints all the same, or I can vary the printing technique to make variations in the images.

I often spend weeks working at an etching. But last year I was in show in which each artist showed 50 artworks done in 50 days. It was a real challenge to make an etching a day. It forced me to silence the inner critic, to simplify my ideas, and to not get lost in details.

In the past two years my etchings have won prizes in shows at the Triton Museum of Art, the Los Gatos Art Museum, and the Gualala Art Center, as well as being in juried shows at the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, and the Sebastopol Center for the Arts. My wife, Edie Uber, and I have been "Dueling Portrait Artists" at fundraisers in the South Bay.

In the 1970's, I studied painting at Park College near Kansas city, and then studied printmaking at CSU in Fort Collins, Colorado. In the 1980's my art was in shows and small galleries in Colorado. I was commissioned to make a suite of landscape etchings of Phantom Canyon by a group that was trying to protect it from development. Phantom Canyon is now part of the Nature Conservancy.