Tell us a little about yourself and where you live.
I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky and came out to see Australia in 1972. I had a job lined up before leaving the US as a start up
engineer with John Thompson Aus Pty Ltd working on the Yallourn W power station in Victoria. Unfortunately, I was in the sad
position of being the least mechanical engineer that I have ever met.
While dangling in a bosun’s chair 100 m above the floor of the boiler trying to take pictures of a roof tube leak, with no safety
harness, I suddenly realised that it was time to look for another job.
As the old expression goes, those that cannot do something become teachers of that something. So I went back to college for
a year and qualified as a teacher.
Then about two years later I returned to the local technical school to teach the power plant operators something titled “How
not to blow up your boiler.” Whenever we had an excursion to the power stations, I insisted that the students keep their hands
in their pockets. My fear was that they would playfully press an emergency stop button and trip the whole power station as a
result.
Along the way I became interested in computers and what you could do with them. They were great for classical guitar duets
because you did not have to cuss and discuss pieces that you were playing.
How did you become interested/get started in Photo Artistry?
Around 2010, I took a sessional teaching job with the Media Design stream of international students doing Foundation Studies
at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. My bit was to introduce the students to Photoshop and InDesign with the goal
of producing their own fifty page class magazine by the end of the year.
The frustrating part was never being able to really teach Photoshop in depth. Just a short three hour introduction to a topic
(like animation) and then on to the next topic.
I retired from teaching in 2013 and began playing with Photoshop. I soon became an online course addict starting with Photo-
shop Artistry. And it just sort of grew from there.
What inspires you or gives you inspiration to create your art?
The training modules in Awake and Shift Art give me new things to try out as I work my way through the modules. I go back
every few months to look at the Photoshop Artistry challenges. They always seem to help with a new project.
Do you have a certain approach to creating your art?
I am still at the stage of simply looking through the resource materials from PA, Awake and Kaizan and putting them together
with no particular plan. They just kind of develop themselves.
The few occasions that I have tried to plan something out in advance, it morphs into something completely different than what
I had intended at the start. But that suits me just fine.