When I first started real painting, I was in sixth grade, but I can't really remember ever a time when I wasn't coloring or cutting or pasting or drawing.

From the time I was little, my earliest memories actually are two years old.

I always wanted to be an artist, and when I was five years old, I distinctly remember telling my cousins that I was going to be an artist when I grew up.

My early art influences were these Nerman Rockwell.

I don't paint anything like him, but he was a real true inspiration.

How do I visualize a painting?

What makes me want to paint something, or what process do I go through to create a painting?

I'm a very visual person.

I love to look, to use my eyes to see, and what really attracts me now is light.

The essence of light against dark, or contrast, warm against cool, large against small.

When I work with composition, sometimes I'm spontaneous, but I'm more of a planner, and so I tend to plan specifically where I want things and what I want.

When I look back over my body of work to this point in time, because I plan to keep on going, there are a lot of different themes, but there's always something that pulls them together.

I grew up in the suburbs of Orange.

If you've never heard of Orange, it's in Franklin Township in the back mountain.

So I grew up basically in the woods and the fields, so I love landscape.

I still love to paint the forest and wildflowers and nature, but I love history, and so I've done a lot of work with anthracite coal.

And what I did was create 300 hexagons of the history of anthracite coal in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

I got into that because when I was growing up, there were still a lot of breakers around.

Started doing the coal breaker communities, and that meant I had to do some people.

I made the people of all different class structures.

There were the rich, and there were the poor.

There were the miners, and there were the breaker boys.

And there was everybody in between, the shopkeepers, the mill workers, and there was a whole community there.

The history of the Battle of Wyoming is really the background of the colonial movement from Connecticut.

So I went to the 225th reenactment of the Battle of Wyoming, and did probably about 20 paintings.

There were the Yankee-Pennemite Wars, which was really America's first civil war, was fought right here in Wyoming Valley.

The colonists who settled in Wyoming Valley were from Connecticut.

But then the Native Americans and the British realized that Wyoming Valley was a kingpin area because of the Susquehanna River.

The British were giving a lot of support to the Native Americans.

It was a major battle, and the British and the Native Americans won that one.

There are historians who say it was even more important than the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

I can't remember anything really inspiring me to become an artist, because in my heart of hearts, that's all I ever wanted to be, was an artist.

I wanted to paint and color and create things with my hands.