My earliest memories of making art go back to first grade. I can still remember a big crayon drawing of a sinking ship I made on a sheet of butcher paper the day the Princess Kathleen ran aground and sank near Juneau. Later that school year my best friend, Richard Olsen, and I vowed we would be artists when we grew up. To us, being an artist meant you liked to draw. Years later, in different places, we're both still at it, though what it means to be an artist has often seemed far removed from liking to draw. Artists, we found, are easily cast into the on-going and difficult conflict between the individual's spirit and the conditions of culture.

When I enrolled in art school in San Francisco, in the mid-sixties, a common belief was that painting was dead. Contemporary art was (and still is) seen as the end result of a progression of ideas that built on and refined each other in a search for higher degrees of truth, much like the way we model our thinking in other disciplines, such as science and philosophy. The implication at the time was that, through a process of formal reduction, all the good painting ideas had been used up. Painting had arrived back where it started, at the empty canvas. Minimalism was the dominant style, and its features were blankness, repetition and industrial materials and finishes.

Faced with an empty canvas, some artists turned on their own bodies and began painting or mutilating themselves. Others began acting out inner dramas, took up shamanism, or decided art should get political. The Vietnam War made being a painter in a studio seem self-indulgent.

I decided to follow an interest in photography, (which didn't seem subject to the same kind of dogmatic analysis as painting), thinking that at least I could be outdoors more. Photography led me into filmmaking, but I ultimately ended up feeling that the technological interface inherent in both mediums somehow short-circuited, or took the edge off, the kind of art experience I was looking for. In 1978, I moved back to Alaska where I started drawing again and, in 1980, painting. If painting was dead, then it was dying a very slow, operatic death, and maybe there was still time to get in on it.

Whatever the medium, my art has often been concerned with a sense of place, with nature or the lack of it, with interiors with a view or with a psychological aspect of environment. I also have strong formal interests in composition and color.

A painting is a metaphysical construction. The parts should all relate to each other, not only in two-dimensions, but also in relationship to the viewer's intellect. The artist provides the arena, imagining a viewer much like him or herself, but different , requiring the artist to make a mental stretch. The viewer looks at the painting in order to make a connection, which may also requre a stretch.

When it works it can be like two musicians jamming with each other, or two lovers who sense each other's thoughts across a room. Like a small miracle, it happens across space and time. Maybe that's why the act of painting has a slightly erotic aspect to it, often unspoken but at the back of the artist's mind. It is the artist's job to make this possible. It is the viewer's job to look openly and knowledgeably. Sitting in front of a good painting, one you connect with, can be an exquisite coming together of sensory and mental experiences.

In today's overly-entertained and techno-hooked culture, it sometimes takes faith to believe in something as low-tech as painting, or as "highbrow" as art. Nonetheless, I think art continues to appeal because of its unique complexity, because the rules are constantly shifting, because its meaning for you changes as you change; because it can operate on many levels, and it mirrors, in its own rough way, the most unformable questions about existence. We need it like food.