I began painting at a very early age.  I remember going to classes at the Davenport Art Museum in 4th or 5th grade, learning the basics of drawing and painting.  One of my earliest painting memories was a trip to the zoo where I did a painting of some brown animal that was in a mud-pit, of course the animal was barely visible.   Throughout middle and high school I took art each year and was in the advanced art class by my senior year and part of the annual exhibit where the top seniors got to display their work.

I stopped painting for a very long time after high school and got interested again after visiting museums in Europe in 1998 and going to the Monet show at the Portland Art Museum that same year.   When I left Microsoft at the end of 1999 I started attending the Seattle Academy of Realist Art and Cornish College of the Arts.  At the Academy I studied oil painting of all types and color theory while at Cornish I took art history.

I went back to software wok in 2004 full-time for several years and then got interested again in painting when a friend did the 2012 30-Day Art Challenge in Seattle.  I began doing pastels and oils from our travels to Utah that year.  In 2013 I decided to enter the 30-Day Challenge myself and decided to blog about the experience.