Growing up on a homestead in Eastern Montana, I spent much time in the great outdoors, working in the fields, riding horseback, tending cattle, hunting or fishing, cross-country skiing. Landscape always impressed itself on my sensibility. So it was quite natural that as a painter I would be drawn to the landscape genre.

As a boy I loved nature: wild animals, birds, Indian lore, camping in the wild. I read and studied and kept notebooks with drawings to help me remember.

In High School I loved science, math, and biology, where we dissected and drew frogs and grasshoppers. In college I majored in art and began with a minor in chemistry. After the War, the minor was changed to philosophy.

After surviving World War II in the Pacific, while I was in art school in Minneapolis the Lord drew me into faith in Jesus Christ; I became a Christian. It was a life-changing experience. In my enthusiasm, I quit art school, went to Luther Seminary and into the ministry, serving in the Dakotas for seven years before realizing that the Lord was calling me back into art. In the fall of 1959 I resigned from my pastoral work on the campus of the North Dakota State University and moved my family to Iowa City, where we would spend five years while I worked on a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting, with a heavy emphasis on art history.

In May of 1965, as I was about to graduate, Purdue University called me to come to West Lafayette for an interview. After two days on campus, I was hired -- I had not even applied for the job. It was quite unusual; the hand of God was evident. So we moved to Indiana where over the course of a few years I became a painter of the Midwest landscape.

It took a while to acclimate from the West to the Midwest, from Western scenery to the more modest landscape of the heartland. I have found the farmlands, woodlands, stream and rivers, and especially the exot

In the art world of the 1950s and 1960s I learned to appreciate abstract form, sensuous paint, and the brush-stroke. Those years were good training. As I have moved back into realism, the abstract brushstroke has been shaped into tangled grass, weeds, and trees.

Landscape always has been my primary concern. In my early years it was the Western land from which I came. But in the last decades I have discovered the land along the Wabash. It is lush and verdant in contrast to the West, a gift of God to feed the world and inspire artists.

I have worked in oil, acrylic, watercolor, and pen and ink, but in recent years I have devoted most of my time to pastel works. The works on paper shown here are a combination of powdered pigment and pastel. The paper is toned initially with powdered pigment as an under-painting, then finished in pastel.