The Artist

In 1988, after receiving my College degree in Visual Fine Arts, I left the academic art world and chose to experience the rich underground art scene of the the street life in Montreal. Safe from the quotidian concerns that had beset my family's distaff line, i soon was on the search for an environment that would encourage artistic lifestyle in a nature setting. My quest took me to Tofino, a village on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in Clayoquot Sound. I lived in an abandoned draft dodger's cabin, deep in the old-growth forest, possessed by the spirit of Emily Carr, who wrote, "There is something bigger than fact: the underlying spirit, all it stands for, the mood, the vastness, the wildness. ‘’ This same spirit incubated my work’s mysticism and the desire to sense and interpret its reality.


I began to explore plein air landscape paintings, apprenticed to Josephine Fletcher, and a handful of other important painters living in Clayoquot at that time. The forest is a living cathedral and i found relief within her wild beauty.

I soon lost any desire to work in a studio, and consecrated my soul to the Church of Plein Air. Often (and i still do) i carried my gear through miles of forest and across beaches to find the perfect spot; but passion gives boundless energy. 


Ironically, it was while immersed in the natural vistas of Clayoquot that my inner landscape began to unfold. Nature was my school, where an expression of my own personal unconscious in light and

shadow, stillness and movement, smells and sensations and the emotional responses they trigger began to unfold.

I hung out with legendary figurative forest-dwelling artists Godfrey Stephens, Andrew Struthers, Michael Henri Wright, and Kal Kan. I binged on art books left to mold in the artist’s cabins (Van Gogh, group of Seven, Emily Carr,..) i had already studied at school but the intimate kinship i found with the masters during my many years of lonesome forest nights, resulted in an unadulterated relationship with their work.

In 1995 I flew to Hawaii, where my Plein Air work matured and also where my ‘’innerscapes’’ emerged, delving more and more in the abstract language for the next 16 years on the slopes of a volcano. It was an important piece of my personal puzzle, affected by the strong emotional expressive Hawaiien presence..

But Hawaii was not home. After nursing my aging parents for the next 10 years, i came back to BC, the land that stole my heart in my younger artist formative years. I was ready to become visible in the cultural landscapes of Canada.

While Plein Air painting is, to me, akin to a reverent pilgrim through cathedrals , my expressionistic abstract takes me on a profound venture where the landscapes coalesce with the innerscapes of my psyche. 



My body of work offers a retrospective mosaic that discloses contrasting stages of my life. From Montreal street life, to the old growth forest of the West Coast, the Hawaiian jungle, the more internalized life in the Quebec Laurentians and the 2021 integrative expression of all the phases maturing in plein air landscapes, figures and abstract.






My work combines the wild intimate brush strokes of Emily Carr and her spiritual connection to the land, the simplified modern design of the Group of Seven’s landscapes, the emotional impressionistic rendition of Van Gogh’s vision, the mysticism of Chagall, the raw dark protests of Basquiat, the abstract expressionism of De Kooning and the eternal questions posed by Gauguin in his masterpiece: ‘’Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?