In 1981 my wife, the writer/artist sloy & I banded together with a pact that with her words & my pictures we would create a body of work focused on transcendence, not ideas. It remains our calling to this day. I started by drawing & painting the houses, trees, cars & people of the northeast Salem neighborhood I've lived in or around most of my life. This place remains a fundamental source of inspiration. Since those 1st days I've expanded my horizons somewhat. We've lived on Camano Island, WA, and in San Diego, driven & camped from Salem to NYC twice taking long ways home, made numerous trips back & forth around the Western US & recorded all in drawings, paintings & words. Almost from the beginning my representations of life started edging toward abstraction. In 1983 I called a color pencil drawing of a chair 'Transporting Furniture to Heaven' because the chair seemed to be dissolving. I was also becoming aware of the importance of line in my work. Usually a few quickly drawn lead pencil lines were the basis of my drawings & paintings, big & small. Those 2 forces, dissolving & line, working on each other have been the crux of everything i've done since & with that, the dialogue between drawing the life around me & the dissolving into, has been almost exclusively non objective work since 2008. To my eyes it reads as 'real'.

~Nic