I earned a BFA in painting from Queen’s University, then took an absorbing detour into graphic design, typography, animation, game creation, and web design. The detour then became a pretty enjoyable career as a creative director. Yet all the while, I was filling notebooks with moments, with sketches and photos and memos, capturing those snippets of color and shape that stopped me dead in my tracks and gave me that knot in my stomach, gathering them against a day when I would transform them into fully realized art.

Then one morning, as I was walking in the woods taking yet more pictures to put in those accumulating sketchbooks, in a moment of pure lucidity it hit me. Epiphany might be a strong word, but really, it was just like that. The time had come. The pile of notebooks had become too huge and too rowdy to be ignored. They were asking “if not now, then when?” The art insisted on being created. The moments demanded to be shared. And the necessity of creating these pictures became my daily work.