I’m often asked, “When did you start painting?” To which I sometimes respond, “When did you stop?”

We all drew, finger-painted, scribbled, sculpted as kids. At some point, most of us let it all go (with the exception of that required art project in second grade). But I grew up saturated in art. Some of my earliest memories are of doodling, under my Mom’s art table (she’s been a professional artist since her twenties). Surrounded by art materials and plenty of encouragement, I never stopped making art.

That is, until I hit puberty – and a set of perfectionistic standards that were so high, I couldn’t climb over my self-imposed wall of high-idealism. I was winning art awards, even selling paintings, but my technical skills just couldn’t pull off the internal vision that I could see so clearly. I gave it all up.

Until late high school. Staying out late with my first girlfriend, I would show up to school the next morning, drop-dead sleepy. My only means of staying awake was to doodle alongside my history notes. At year’s end, we were required to turn in our class notes. I was anxious, thinking it would be a testament to my poor attention span. Two years later, in college, I would discover that my teacher had photocopied my notes to hand out in all of his classes – notes that were conveniently supplemented with historically-relevant illustrations.

I attended the Colorado School of Mines for two years, with the dream of continuing on to grad school in Astrophysics. It wasn’t long before I’d taken every humanities course at the college, and my refuge was the tiny room at the top of the campus library, where all the poetry and literature was housed. I was simultaneously experimenting with intense sleep deprivation (inspired by Da Vinci, among others), along with pushing my body to its physical limits through exercise (Yoga and mountain running). It was my Yoga practice (learned straight from Iyengar’s classic, “Light On Yoga”), that I had my first consciously-evoked and scientifically-reproducible encounters with the transpersonal. I transferred to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I finished with a Bachelor’s in English (Creative Writing) and Psychology.

Upon graduation, I worked as a children’s bus driver, ice cream scooper, telephone psychic, and cook/waiter at the Mountain Sun Pub & Brewery. When the brewpub’s chalkboard artist left, management sniffed out the fact that I could draw, and requested that I give the chalkboards a shot. After drawing what I determined to be a disastrous synthesis of astrophysics and brewery life (a scene of the solar system, replacing planets with beer mugs, burgers, and fries), I vowed to not touch chalk again. But…I did, and gradually become slightly more skilled with every chalkboard I attempted.

Local bands, which filled the pub with music on Sunday nights, began asking me for poster art, garment designs, and album covers. Eventually, I was picking up enough gigs with Yonder Mountain String Band, The Motet, and others, that I quit the brewpub, and headed out on my own as an illustrator, fine artist, and graphic artist, a path I would follow for the next eight years.

Just prior to the birth of my second child, I took the position of Graphic Artist at Boulder’s mighty Whole Foods Market. I gleaned skills – production under extreme pressure, letting go of stultifying perfectionism in a high-demand environment, delegation of projects, etc. – that I had not been able to learn on my own. It was this “artist’s boot camp” environment that gave me the discipline and confidence to set out on my own, once again. After an evening of hashing out ideas with my wife, I awoke in the wee hours of that night, an electric current running through my bodymind, a vision rooted firmly in the soil of my artistic heart. A vision that would evolve into “1000 Views of God”.