About
autoBIO
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, I spent my early years growing up in my mother’s childhood home, a house built in the Greek Revival style in 1927. The view from the front porch was of Beaver Lake, which before its creation had been a landing field for my grandfather’s airplane. We sold the house when I was nine and my mother moved us to Europe. Most of the first year was spent traveling around the continent in a 1965 Bel Air station wagon, perhaps the largest automobile most people there had ever seen at the time. Our arrival often created a stir whenever we pulled into a small village in Italy or Spain. Eventually we settled in Paris where I attended boarding school at Notre-Dame de Boulogne outside of the city near the famed Bois. During those years living in Europe, I began to make pictures with a camera wherever we traveled and in the museums I looked at pictures made by an art history of painters. In France, I walked among the ruins of the ancient Romans and found a world to myself in the woods of Boulogne and Fontainebleau to the south. My teachers assigned me to read Jean de la Fontaine and Charles Baudelaire, poets in whose writing I learned allegory and the peripatetic way. And in the spring of 1968, I was given a lesson in political resistance that I have never forgotten.
From these beginnings it seems inevitable that I would seek a career in art as well as one that involved travel. A life in art and education has given me the appreciation for the poem, The Way It Is by William Stafford:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
Things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
Or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
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