About the Artist

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The text between these asterisks has been added August 2020 with an important update. In June of 2020, I learned that I had a glioblastoma brain tumor that will probably kill me in about a year (per averages). Rather than become depressed, I've decided to take advantage of my time left to, among other things, finish my last grand painting project of the Immaculate Reception NFL play from the 1972 playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders. This is something I have wanted to do since I started painting 15 years ago, but never resolved how to do it, because of limited reference and compositional difficulties, until the last year or so. I had been working on this project in earnest all of 2020 with the expectation that I would finish it in time for the 50th anniversary of the play. My health, however, has forced me into a different timetable. I may have only to the summer of 2021 to finish the painting before I'm finished. If you have any interest in this project (or me), please sign up for my NEWSLETTER

If you do, you will receive a direct email with updates on the project (and me) once or twice a month. 

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I’m originally from Pittsburgh, PA, where I attended Saturday morning art classes at Carnegie Museum and twice tried out for the Pirates. I went to Penn State, where I studied mechanical engineering and played on the baseball team. After graduation, I moved to Southern California to start a career as a mechanical engineer in the aerospace industry. In the past 40 years I married, raised a family, and worked on lots of cool stuff including the Space Station and Space Shuttle. I’ve been high up on a launch tower at Cape Canaveral and low down in a submarine. Now I spend my time in my home studio, painting fine art as a second career.

For me, painting or drawing is like meditating on a series of Zen¹ koans, unsolvable riddles used as a tool to calm the mind. The riddle for me is the search for the triple point of a career where selfish interests, the desire to please others, and the validation of making money intersect. In physics, the triple point of water is the pressure and temperature at which water can simultaneously exist as ice, liquid, and vapor.² The triple point is a precarious state in which the slightest change in pressure or temperature causes the immediate transition from one phase to another. Similarly, it is my internal passion (or temperature) and external influences (or pressure) that cause my state of mind to move, always striving for and then often passing through that elusive triple point of motives in which I’m feeling fulfilled, generating genuine appreciation from others, and making a buck all at the same time.

Because each painting becomes a new koan, started with varying amounts of passion and external influences that may or may not be fulfilled, it is very difficult to maintain any consistency at the triple point from one painting to the next. No set formula that always works. Each painting is a new riddle that I work on without knowing if there’s a solution. Further, because we all have a unique set of experiences in life, each of us has a unique triple point, where the proportional emphasis on the three motives is not equal and can change as experiences change. But for each painting, there is an assumed optimum balance of motives that I strive for, and the resulting processes of decision-making and problem-solving become the real goal, the real fun, the real reason to paint.

If by chance or by design, I suddenly become enlightened and find myself balanced at the triple point, which has happened for a few of my paintings³, the next move is to simply enjoy the moment and start another painting. What calms the mind is not the achievement, but the continued experience---as long as there is the understanding that the goal is really the experience. A practical example of this is the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, where the odds of winning are low but the required effort is high and an artist inevitably questions whether to enter or not.⁴

To work at solving the unsolvable by solving what you can is really all there is. Although at times it may seem as if this isn’t enough, there will always be times when it is enough. That’s just the nature of life, always changing. To keep trying is the true essence of the journey. I hope to paint and draw for the rest of my life.

Footnotes:

1. When I was in high school, my psychology teacher once boasted, “With proper reinforcement you can get anyone interested in anything. Take Berger here, I could get him interested in Zen Buddhism if I wanted to.” I’ve been interested ever since.
2. The triple point of water occurs at 32.018^°F and 0.0887psi.  While testing the second stage of a Delta III rocket at NASA’s Plum Brook facility, I once witnessed small icicles building up on the edge of the engine nozzle as very hot water vapor---the product of hydrogen and oxygen combustion---escaped through the nozzle during an engine firing in a low-pressure test chamber.
3. I donated two paintings of the X37-B to the Pentagon and Vandenberg Air Force Base. The one at the Pentagon sits on the other side of the wall from an Everett Raymond Kinstler painting. I’ve sold over 200 prints of the two paintings. To view the paintings, go to the “Limited Edition” page on my website. Prints are still available for purchase.
4. For information about the Federal Duck Stamp Contest, see “Articles” on my website. For examples of my entries, see “Works/Wildlife.”