The first thing I remember is moving to my home in Florence. My father moved us there from Wesson to take a coaching position with the high school. After moving into our new house, I remember my mother crying over how terrible the kitchen looked.

I walked with my mother to the Western Auto store where she bought some cans of paint. She tacked flattened tin cans to the kitchen floor where there were holes and gave me a brush. We stood over the floor splattering different colored paint on the old flooring to create faux linoleum.

I claimed the naugehyde-covered wooden desk in the family room as my own. It was specifically turned to face directly away from the TV and immediately behind my father's chair. The desk was full of useless stationary that had been left behind by the school's old coach. I was incredibly happy now that I had something I wouldn't get in trouble for drawing on, and I drew continuously as my father watched television behind me.

Mrs. Rose Taylor read stories to us in a class at the community center. The classes had a decidedly artistic slant given Mrs. Taylor's interest in art. She would illustrate the characters she was reading to us about, and afterwards we would draw pictures about the story. I loved that.

When first grade was ready to begin, my mother asked "Miss Rose" to teach me private art lessons. We stood at her back door in the rain and she told me she had never taught art and she felt that she couldn't do it. So, we went home and a few minutes later she called and said she would try. Mrs. Rose gave me my most important education and it continued through junior high. She taught me, more than anything else, a love for art; and she always told me I would be an artist and have a studio and that was always what I thought I would do. I developed Chicken Pox, an infection that soon led to a Strep and a trip to the hospital. Bed rest and more drawing followed. I couldn't do anything else but lie in bed, so I was glad I could draw.

My younger brother was burned severely as a child, and my older brother, Jim, and I were sent to live with my grandmother at the University of Southern Mississippi where she was a dorm mother. For several months we lived in a storage room on the ground level of the dorm. We didn't attend school while there but did my second grade workbook assignments instead. I drew a lot and played around the campus with my brother. The college girls would take us to the movies and the goofy golf and generally just spoiled us.

In school, drawing and daydreaming were my favorite pastimes. I always used drawing as a problem-solving tool. I had a best friend who would collaborate with me on inventions and cartoons and ideas that I would visualize on paper. It was a teamwork type of friendship that continued through my high school years. In the 6th grade I broke my leg playing football and had to attend school in a wheelchair. I learned to play the guitar at that time. I didn't have a guitar, but I made a photocopy of an instruction book and drew frets and strings on a piece of cardboard and knew chord forms before I had ever heard them. In my junior high school years, I played in a band with a friend and wrote and sang songs.

I moved to Clinton, Mississippi in the tenth grade and was more or less normal. My high school years were generally uneventful. I enrolled at Mississippi College, and Dr. Gore gave me the encouragement I needed to study art. I stayed in the art department most of the time. I graduated with a BA in Art and a minor in English and received the Belleman award for Art and creative writing.

I immediately returned there to graduate school and eventually received my masters. I began selling paintings in college at flea markets and art fairs on weekends. I would do 15-minute pencil portraits of people and have my paintings in a stack behind me to show to interested people if they asked. I still have clients from those days. I met museum and gallery directors. Working on location became the way for me. I was always taught to work on location, and it turned into a valuable promotional thing as well. My past shyness was broken down by having to deal with people directly.

I also had models who paid me. My drawing skills improved and I didn't charge much, $7.50 a sitting, doing 4 an hour for 6 hours at a time. So I had money to paint during the rest of the week as well. I met and married Vicki Little in graduate school. Vicki has always supported my painting: helping me critique at the end of the day, writing letters to collectors on my behalf to promote shows. If I had married someone else I don't know if I would still be painting today. The life of an unestablished artist is hard, and she has been with me since 1978. She was a schoolteacher during most of our marriage, but now she hand-leafs and finishes the frames for my paintings, the preferred method of presentation for the paintings I do. I got a job at a local print house and worked there for a while. I would work, save money, quit and paint. I'd paint until I ran out of money, get another job, and the cycle would begin again. I worked jobs as a department store window designer and as a t-shirt designer, at any job I could get that was art related. I had friends who got jobs in fields outside their interest and they never got back to their passion. Some employers would criticize me telling me I was a quitter for doing this, but they were just temporary jobs in my eyes. I always knew my real job was painting. They were, in their way, as inspirational as Miss Rose and Doctor Gore.

Theo Inman, at that time director of the artist in schools programs for Mississippi, hired me as an artist in residence for Lauderdale County. Vicki and I were newly-weds and we worked and saved most of the money that year and moved back to start painting in Jackson, Mississippi.

I went around to galleries and was met with the same response, "No one knows who you are." So I began working in the center of the capital city. The downtown. At that time that area was going through a big change. Buildings were being torn down and many of Jackson's buildings of personality were vanishing. I met a lot of people, curious onlookers. Some people thought I was homeless. I sold paintings on the street and finally was able to gain greater exposure when a large bank had a cancellation of a show in the lobby, and I was asked to exhibit the paintings I had accumulated.

photo by Brian Broom

After that I developed a new focus on my painting. I began working ahead of the wrecking ball as it tore down the city I remembered. I found representation in a gallery in Jackson and continued there for 18 shows. Things began to change in 1989 when my daughter Crimson was born. She has been the other inspiration for me and today sings with her own beautiful voice. I began building a studio on our property where my wife does my framing today. At one point in my career I changed my direction from a more studio/photo-derivative approach to a strict on-location colorist approach. I lost collectors but eventually gained more. I try to always remember that part of my life. It taught me to never doubt my real feelings and to steadfastly trust my instincts.

I write and perform for the band WatersEdge. You may download our MP3s here.

The Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi have hosted solo shows of my work, and I am currently represented by Mississippi and Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi. Two books on my paintings have been published, and I was chosen to do the commemorative poster for both the Jubilee Jam festival in Jackson and the 1999 Mississippi on the Mall picnic in Washington, D.C. I am past president and signature member of the Mississippi Watercolor society. My work has been featured in numerous magazine articles including American Artists Special Watercolor Issues, Art and Antiques, and Mississippi Magazine. I have also worked on promotional projects for Parisian Stores, Texaco, and Standard Oil, and my works are held in a large number of corporate collections.

I have continued to work on location throughout my career; painting the life I know and the places I live. I initially worked on location for impressionistic effects; but, after pushing my physical eyes, other types of seeing began to emerge and a more expressive color resulted. Painting exists for me as a method of purifying my own experience of a subject and extending the interaction between subject and observer beyond the point of reality. My paintings serve as a recording of my experience with the subject, and therefore could not be produced from a photograph in a studio, but only captured on location. If I could take a photograph that would be satisfactory to myself for painting from, I would certainly be a photographer rather than watercolorist. Observed-color is the foundation of my color choices and the basis from which I derive the magnified hues of a scene. I now paint not because I know how to paint, but as a way of learning about what I do not. Painting ultimately exists for me as a method by which I may embrace and explore the mystery of everyday life and situation.