Wellllll, I started drawing as a boy and I liked it a lot — so much so, in fact, that my favorite thing to do was to visit the art store on my birthday. Okay, it wasn’t actually an art store. It was a paint store with a few shelves of art supplies.
But my mother would let me get whatever I wanted, and I just loved to look at the assortment of colors of the pastel sets and the oil paint tubes. I imagined myself creating artwork that was beautiful and that brought a smile to people’s faces. I’d 
get a box of oil pastels along with some colored charcoal paper with a sandpaper block and blending tortillons. I never figured out what to do with the sand paper block or the fancy-looking tortillons, but they made me feel like a professional artist to be using such specialized tools in some kind of way.
It felt pretty good drawing with pastels, and I liked drawing with charcoal even better as I listened to the Beatles and Aerosmith and Stevie Wonder on my brother’s record player.
I remember in the summertime hanging out with my family on Block Island, in Rhode Island Sound, drawing the sandy beach dunes, waves, and seagulls. Or having some fun bike riding the island (when I wasn’t getting caught in the rain, that is.)
Devouring the secrets of Walter T. Foster and Jon Gnagy’s drawing booklets I would draw lions, tigers and monkeys, and, eventually, Renaissance statues (naked ladies). This was a lot more fun to me than playing baseball at age nine.
At twelve, I combined my love for art and the Beatles to create my first animation – a short adaptation of ‘Yellow Submarine’. I made cut-out paper characters with taped “joints” and drew backgrounds with colored pencils and markers. The stop motion animation was filmed with a Yashica Super-800 Electro camera, ‘shot on twos’ (click click …click click). We recorded a soundtrack that had my dad doing a “walrus roar” (like the MGM lion) that synced up to a cel animation I had drawn. My buddy did all the Beatles voices. Despite all its imperfections, the film turned out to be ‘not half bad’…I mean…for a twelve-year-old.
— So let’s fast forward to the new millennium, where I’m a lot older than twelve, and now know a little bit about graphic design, motion graphics, filmmaking and photography as well.
I had moved to Chicago to study filmmaking at the Art Institute and played around with a new program called Photoshop at home, eventually getting work on the basis of skills self-taught at the Swill Hole. The Swill Hole was the name my filmmaking friend gave to our huge ratty loft that looked down on Maxwell Street, above a hip hop clothing store, across from Jim’s smelly hot dog stand and just a couple of buildings down from the ‘greasy spoon’ where they had filmed Aretha Franklin and Matt “Guitar” Murphy performing ‘Think’ in the original Blues Brothers movie. Anyway, the place was a swill hole. I can tell you stories about the place in person.
One day, wanting to add to my developing computer graphics skills, I thought to myself, what would it be like to work in a photography studio? Let me see how they do it. So I did this and found out that they would pay me to assist them. Not a bad deal. So after being a photographer’s assistant in Chicago studios for a couple dozen skilled photographers I am happy to have learned about lighting and shooting.
Now, computer graphics, retouching, illustration, and my main “thing” — motion graphics, is something I have been doing for more than 15 years — first for a lean and mean video game company, then for a multimedia developer, and finally for a digital signage company that eventually became ‘graphics support’ for affiliated advertising agencies in Chicago and elsewhere on the planet. We would help them to win business pitches by showing what a TV commercial or animated web ad would look like before it was created, or in some cases we would create the real world version. Occasionally we would jazz up typical business slideshows by adding movies or other graphic content. Probably the best-looking work took a real ‘team-of-specialists’ approach that had us focusing mainly on the animating and editing.
Just so you know, I had gone to school for this fine art stuff when I was younger. Prior to studying filmmaking in Chicago I got myself the fine art degree known as “Studio Art with a concentration in Drawing, Painting and Photography.” You know, I really love drawing, to this day, and am working on creating a body of fine art work to share with the world. I tend to like to draw “crowd pleaser” stuff like seascapes, famous musical artists, sports figures and fantasy work rather than working out personal angst in my artwork like so many do.
So now I’ve moved back to poetically beautiful New England and I am enjoying relaxing near the shores of this world’s finest estuary. I’m happy to say that I’ve discovered a couple of clam shacks that actually give you a couple of clams in your clamcakes and I’ve found a place that has the best clear chowder, with many quahogs.
Now that’s good stuff.