It was about this time in my life when I packed my house up and began to do some touring in a 20 foot travel trailer. Obviously, I wasn't going to be able to work on my usual style of painting, so had to find something smaller to satisfy my artistic urges!

I did alot of writing and my photography didn't take up much room, so I did more of that - but I found that I still needed something more tactile to do, so I started making small jewellery items.

It seemed natural for me to pick up rocks where ever we went, as I happen to have a fascination for the colours and patterns on rocks - so rocks became the medium for my jewellery making. Some were just semi-polished and wrapped with silver wire - others were sedimentary and soft enough to allow carving into and drawing on.

Pencils do not take up much space, and give the opportunity to bring color into the picture (pardon the pun). So I did a few stylized works with pencil crayon when I was confined inside because of miserable weather. These two below were inspired by the  stone 'dancing bears' of an Inuit carver named   Enook Manomie that I had seen in a gallery. There was no way I could look at his carvings without smiling, and I returned several times to the Gallery for another dose of their mirthfulness.

As I travelled, I had a sketchbook with me for those tranquil times waiting for one thing or another - or just to keep myself creatively active. What I enjoy sketching the most is small snipets of plant life.

After a few years of travelling I settled in one spot for a while again.

I suppose perhaps after working on two or three inch pieces of rock for three years, a 24" canvas seemed large enough to start with. I began to paint again, and found I didn't want to be restricted to fine details anymore. After scratching tiny aspects of designs into hard sedimentary rock, I just wanted to fling the paint around, but the large canvases seemed a bit daunting......so much white space to fill!

After I had painted a few smaller canvases and had some new photos developed, I realized that they were beginning to resemble one another. I found this rather interesting, so began to compare a few.

The colours, the rhythm, the feel of the paintings was becoming similar to the photographs I had been taking, and vice versa. In absence of the paint, I was attempting to paint with my camera lens. It's an interesting entity, this creative spirit that dwells within. It seems to lead me where it wants to go without my noticing. Often, I am merely a puppet to its whims.

The following pictures do not fall into the category of 'retrospective' because they are things I am currently working on, but I wanted to include them here because they reveal the next steps.

I have been working on book illustrations for Rob Bryanton's next book.  "O is for Omniverse" is the working title, and we look forward to it soon being published. It falls within his "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" field, and it has been both enjoyable and challenging working at the illustrations.

In these illustrations I have combined my photography and my painting with digital manipulations in photo editing and drawing software programs. It widens the scope of the images I can present, and opens the thought processes to what might be possible. It's been fun - and it has me wondering just where that creative muse within may lead me to next!