Mixed Media Artist

Bob won a drawing contest in Grade 5. The prize was a chance to draw the map of Australia on the chalk board. He was hooked...and off to a career in art!

Or so He thought. It took a few years to finally get to that career. Although he's mostly self taught, art study was always a part of his life. Classes at the Ontario College of Art, University of Waterloo, York University and some local community colleges helped Bob develop his technique. And while art remained a hobby for many years while he pursued a career in newspapers and magazines, he finally jumped into a permanent art career 15 years ago.

In the beginning, Bob worked with pastel. He loved the soft, chalky look to a landscape and his work was represented by several galleries. Then he was asked to teach a decorative painting class and life changed again. Bob started working with acrylics and learned how to create a soft, pastel-like look to his acrylic paintings.

During the past 12 years, he has licensed his designs to decorative painting magazines; to publishers of instructional painting books; to Highland Graphics, Evergreen, Sagebrush, Directional Art and Penny Lane. And he's taught decorative painting throughout North America.

Some of Bob's award-winning paintings have been juried into shows in New York city, Atlanta, Wisconsin, the Society of Canadian Artists, a national textile exhibition and many local juried shows.

Living in the country affords Bob the opportunity to paint some incredible snapshots of nature. For his larger landscape paintings, he works on the emotional impact of a scene starting with small studies en plein air then uses those studies to create larger studio works filled with colour and texture.

Since Bob's goal is to re-create the feeling of a scene, the color, shapes, textures and sometimes even the subjects can change at will. He’ll use hand-carved stamps and stencils to build texture and images and symbols, and mark-making tools, like pastels , to add direction and energy.