Painter-Pilgrim
Paintings and writings from a life of making, wandering, loss, faith, and return.
I am an American painter and writer living in Paris. For more than forty years, I have built my life around the daily practice of making art. I am also the father of six grown children, some of whom are now beginning families of their own.
In November 2019, I left Michigan and began what became a European pilgrimage. Since then, I have made temporary homes in several places:
the wilderness of Tuscany, where I spent eight months restoring an abandoned stone house and living completely off-grid.
the island of Mallorca, where I lived for six months and made a new body of paintings that would become my Paris exhibition the following spring.
Paris, where, shortly after that exhibition, I was violently assaulted in my apartment on July 2, 2025. I suffered multiple wounds to my head and was forced from my home, suddenly finding myself without a place to live.
the home and studio of fellow artist Véronique Cauchefer, who took me in following the assault and where I continue to live and work while preparing paintings for my next exhibition at Gallery Victor in Chicago.
Something else happened during this period of displacement.
After years of spiritual wandering, I returned to Jesus Christ and to the Christian faith that had first taken root in me as a boy.
This return has begun to reorder the way I understand my life and my work. Painting is no longer simply something I have chosen to do. I understand it as a vocation, something entrusted to me, and a way of responding faithfully with what I have been given.
For more than four decades I have lived largely through the sale of my art. This has sometimes meant living with very little. Increasingly, however, I have come to see poverty not simply as deprivation, but as a place where dependence upon God can become startlingly real.
“Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?”
James 2:5
I continue to paint, write, walk the streets of Paris, and pay attention.
These pages are a record of that continuing pilgrimage.