All My Life I Have Loved Nature and Art.
The result: that for years I have traveled and worked as a field biologist. This has become an integral part of my art work: seeing the wildlife, birds in particular, that I paint and draw.
I am living my dream as a field guide illustrator!
The basis of almost all my work is observation and field sketching, combined occasionally with museum specimens; in particular for the field guide plates that I paint.
My travels as a biologist and artist studying and painting birds have taken me from the Amazon to the Arctic and Antarctic. In 1995 I co-authored and illustrated A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America with Steve Howell.
I continue to work on field guides as a field guide illustrator, a few plates here and there for a variety of neotropical bird guides and most recently I illustrated forty species of marine mammal for a Field Guide to the Marine Mammals of the Pacific Coast.
While working in the Antarctic and at sea on research vessels I started writing and illustrating children’s books. They are modified journals of projects I have worked on illustrated with pencil sketches and watercolor and gouache paintings.
So Far I Have Completed Three:
I love being on the ocean and have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work on numerous cruises either as a researcher or naturalist in the Central Pacific, Eastern Tropical Pacific, Atlantic, Antarctic, Aleutians, Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea. I am a director of Oikonos: Ecosystem Knowledge and research associate of PRBO Conservation Science and a some time employee of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
