"Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence." Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is what we find in life - nature, human achievements and passions, experienced and transcended through our sentient being, given expression and impression, bearing testimony to the eternal dilemma between our search for infinity and our finite lives, our aspiration to ideal divinity, no matter how desperate its channel may be, and in the face of our human limitations.

Aside from exploring paintings of the past and present, my prime and foremost inspiration to start in the oil painting métier, lay in my father introducing me to the art of truly looking at what we see, to dare to be bold, to give in to the delicacy of attraction and aversion to certain colors - and always the trust and the hope, the confidence, that there is a reason for our shared passion and that there be time for it. So in every painting, in all contemplation both spiritually and creatively, to some degree, I see with eyes trying to do with paintbrushes as in life: separate the true from the trite, the honest from the vainglorious.

"The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live." Victor Hugo

Beginning as a diversion, the calling to brush and easel became magnetic, a centering absorption - as it continues over decades, through all ups and downs life has to offer, unifying itself with poetry and music, in the eternal themes of the condition humaine.

"All the fine arts are different species of poetry." Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Always, there is inspiration both in the here and now, as well as in the beyond; the gentle reminder of unrelenting critique, teaching, recalling how much human creation, even if facilitated by talent, is work, strive, aspiration, and prayer.

Art, thus, is something primarily detached from the strive to wealth, it is, above all, a longing to unify in word, sound or vision, our sentiments in and of life, to voice our unanswered questions, to make seen and heard our conscious quest, with all its confusions, wrongs - but also with the glimpse of hope. In a sense, art aims to transcend our own individual being towards the interconnectedness of all life.

"Nature is a revelation of God; Art is a revelation of man." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow