The images on this page are are combination of commissioned illustrations personal work and pictures from my children's books. To find out more detailed click on an image. Over the last thirty years I spend most of my time working for publications on a freelance basis. This is how I earned my living supporting my family and thankfully I never had to get a real job for so long. I consider the past thirty years as an apprenticeship. Honing my craft, making images to the point where I am now able to not only create images but add stories. I had spend a lot of my spare time when not working on commissions painting and learning about who I am as an artist. What is my language, why do I paint this way and not another. While working on commissions it’s hard sometimes to keep the integrity of the work, when you have so many voices with different points of view. As an Illustrator the end result always came from the manuscript. This gave me a very fixed point of view to work from. I had an art director and editors guiding you with their own visions. So while the end result for the most part remained mine, it still was not my vision completely. In other words I may not have made theses images if I was not asked to work on them as a commission. Some of the the illustrations choices were based on color, the design of the page and of course editorial decisions. After all I was still working for someone even though I felt at the time I wasn’t. But that process was more of a collaboration unlike writing and illustrating a picture book. My personal paintings could take me anywhere and I let them and continue to do as they know so much more about where then need to go than I even do. This may sound strange but when I let my imagination and hands do the work Im just there to watch what happens. As I'm still at the early stages of writing and illustrating children’s books the more I work on them the less I feel constrained. My editor and rte director I'm working with at Viking / Penguin have a totally different approach than in the editorial world. They understand this is my vision and I am working with my own content. This is really the key for me as I'm no longer working with someone else’s point of view. It's all mine and this is truly very satisfying. And the best part is I have an audience who Love what I do. I very much have them in my mind as I work.