The Plant Part - One summer, many years ago, I made a trip to Big Bend National Park with a friend of mine. As we climbed from up from the lower Chihuahuan Desert into the Chisos Mountains, through the open woodland and high desert scrub, I was amazed by the diversity of shapes, forms and colors of the native plants. The gnarled junipers, fragrant and bristly pinons, the blue gray explosions of Agave parryi, the low sprawling evergreen oaks and the sparkling green fountains of Dasylirion along with a myriad of other wonderful plants must have germinated a dormant seed in my brain. From then on I became intensely enamored of plants in all their wonderful forms. When I returned home to San Antonio I began to notice all the plants around me in a much more intense fashion. Later college work along the Texas coast introduced me to plants the sea shore. Living in New Orleans I was immersed in plants of the Gulf Coast swamps and marshes and a very long stint living in Scottsdale, Arizona provided me with a treasure chest of unique plants native to the Sonoran Desert. My wife became a horticulturalist providing daily doses of interaction with plants. Our own horticultural and vegetable gardening provided more experiences. It has been a long journey through the plant world. I never tire of looking and learning about plants. I can look up on a mountains, across the shore, down a weedy alley and even look around my feet and I find natures marvels growing and providing me with with fabulous subjects for art.

The Art Part - During the many years that I worked in Arizona in the Computer Mapping business I had daily interaction with computer software for making maps and displaying satellite and aerial images. At that time on-line interactive mapping did not exist in any significant way. The primary output was literally a map, a paper map, produced by a large bed plotter, initially by automated pen drawing, later via a raster based electrostatic process and finally as an ink jet process. Sometimes when we would upgrade either the software driver or the hardware occasionally things would not exactly mesh well and plots would become unstable or terminate before being well registered with the device. This would result in bizarre graphics of wild lines and streaks of color. While disconcerting from a mapping perspective, I often admired the output which was often something interesting from a purely artistic perspective. I began thinking of the intersection of computers and art and since those early days the world of computer based graphics and art has exploded. Recently over the last 10 years I have carved out more and more time to explore this intersection with my love of the plant world added as a third ingredient. The result of this intersection of these influences is what you see in my art.