About the Artist

As a kid I enjoyed the power of being able to render objects realistically. I drew trees and horses; I copied hands from Michelangelo. Drawing was the most natural thing I did.

But in some ways reading and writing about the world felt more powerful and I chose that most loosely defined of all majors, English. Thus began a lifelong dual focus to my creative life.

In the 1960s, as a diversion from the Stanford University English department, I began attending Keith Boyle's life drawing classes in the art department. During that period I was influenced by the figurative work of Richard Diebenkorn and Nathan Oliveira, both of whom were artists-in-residence at Stanford at the time. A later influence: Fritz Bultman's figurative drawings. During that period I had a number of one-man and group shows in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Tension between the two poles of writing and drawing tilted back to literature when I made the sensible, if difficult, decision to finish the PhD. In the '70s and '80s, employed as an English professor at Brown University and elsewhere, I taught courses and wrote on the relationship of literature to visual arts and offered life drawing classes both on campus and in the community at large.

In the '80s and '90s a lot of my energy for drawing went into designing and making plans for building projects I for family, friends and a design/ build company in which I was a partner.

In the '90s the visual art side of the writing / drawing dualism began to insist on more space. In 1996 I published Bodywork, a book of recent drawings accompanied by essays. In recent years I have been part of groups shows at Castle Hill, the Wellfleet library and Senior Center, and PAAM.

In 2006 I was awarded a two week stay at a dune shack in the Outer Cape Artist-in-Residency Consortium program.

In 2008 I decided to provide the art side of my creative life legitimate space and opened Road House Gallery.

My wife Susan and I built a house in 1983 in Wellfleet and moved here fulltime in 1992. I am a longtime op-ed columnist for the Cape Cod Times.