When I was young I liked to draw and I practiced enough to become pretty good at it. I remember talking with my father when I was in High School about my future career choices and maybe becoming an artist. He was wary, afraid for me and said “yeah, but you’ll starve!” I thought he was probably right, so decided to start working as a dishwasher and then a cook in restaurants and I proceeded to starve for years! In retrospect, I probably should have just done what I wanted from the beginning. It took me another thirty years to figure that out.

I took a drawing class in college CU Boulder class of ‘96 but the curriculum and instructor ruined it for me for quite awhile. I drew and painted in acrylics some, but food became my artistic expression for years.

My wife Karin and I met in San Francisco in the late 90s. We moved in to a studio apartment in the Tenderloin a month later and a year after living together we sold everything we had and travelled in Europe for six months. Our love of good food and world travel was solidified. We married in 2002, catering the party ourselves, in a barn with no potable water, refrigeration, or cooking. We celebrated with a bluegrass band and a hundred of our favorite people.

We were still toiling away in restaurants, but always thinking of the next thing. We bought our house in the Highlands neighborhood of Denver when it was not very nice. Our new neighbors recently had cleared out their cat houses and cock fighting rings so we figured it was improving. By 2007 it had improved enough to allow us to pull enough out of the house to buy The Truffle Cheese Shop. Our first son Ron was born later that year and our second, Sam in 2010. We bought a restaurant in our neighborhood in 2013 and renamed it Truffle Table. We started running boutique food and wine tours in France and Italy around then too.

In 2019 we formulated a scheme to divest of all our stuff, take our boys out of school and travel around the world for a year. We world-schooled our boys, visiting museums, historical sites, and teaching them as best we could. Hopefully instilling them with the idea that they can live and travel bravely with respect for history and different people’s current struggles while understanding their part in this huge world. While we were doing that I started drawing regularly again, working my way through the Charles Bargue drawing plates and Proko on YouTube. We only made it halfway around the globe, the sale of our restaurant collapsed and we had to come home. Our thirteenth stamp in our passports was Cyprus.

We found ourselves back in Denver eagerly looking for a new buyer for our restaurant hoping to get back on the road when Covid shut that down. We found ourselves doing what had to be done as restaurant owners in hard times; everything ourselves. But, at least we weren’t stranded somewhere in Asia! When not working, Karin and I both embraced our art, she still makes her ink drawings and paints in watercolors, I worked my way through 250 boxes.

In the summer of ‘21 Karin bought me a pad of canvas paper and my first oil paints. I remember the revelation I felt maybe ten minutes into that first painting, I immediately inherently understood the appeal of oil paints. To me, they are everything I like about drawing, but smoother, faster and in color! I realized before the painting was finished, (it wasn’t even very good) that all I wanted to do anymore was to paint. I had worked with acrylics a fair amount, but they always frustrated me somehow. Oil paint can be made to be transparent or translucent, you can immediately change a line or shape by wiping away, literally erasing what you don’t like and starting over on dry canvas or by dropping thicker paint on top. Also, oils don’t dry out so you can literally pull paint from one part of the canvas to drop it onto another and blend or reshape edges easily. The range and depth of color available with oil paint is incredible too. I’ve recently worked my way through Richard Schmid’s color charts but still feel I’m a novice, especially in the vast ocean of color. I started painting plein air often, living on the front range of the Rocky Mountains makes that easy and I bring my paints on every trip I can go on.

Today, I try to finish three paintings a week, I think of it like going to the gym, the more I paint, the stronger my paintings are and I get to a point where they’re looking good faster. I still have quite a ways to go before I am as strong of a painter as I want to be. I tend to look at what I painted a few months before and my mistakes are obvious, but I think that’s a good thing.

We have recently sold our restaurant and are hoping to someday restart our travel business with a new focus on art and a new home base in the Southwest of France.