My love of fine oil painting reaches back to my education as a painter at Syracuse University. For me, the most important issue about painting is not the commercial printed image which reaches millions, but what a person takes away when experiencing the original work. I moved to New York to be near its wonderful museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Pierpont Morgan Library, and Museum of Modern Art. I still spend many afternoons visiting my favorite artists -- Hans Memling, Jan Van Eyck, Velazquez, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Mondrian, Rembrandt, Rubens and Titian. I strive to comprehend their complexity and bring that into my work. It is the combination of classical aesthetics with my love of Modern abstraction that I attempt to meld into one art form in my paintings. You can see these influences in some of my illustrations.