My interest in art started when I was young. My family had taken a six-month trip to Europe in 1965 when I was a child of twelve. My father, Eugene Larkin, was a professor of art and art history, and so the tour took us through France, Spain, Italy and Greece where we visited major art museums and saw many wonderful architectural monuments. I fell in love with Caravaggio, Botticelli and Michelangelo. Years later, after I had abandoned my attempt to do something more profitable by becoming a doctor, I fell into art-making and never looked back. The problem was that nobody was teaching academic painting practice. Schools everywhere were obsessed with self-expression and, well, whatever. I was learning to be a pretty good drawer but not advancing in painting. I met capable people and learned from them but mostly had to pick up skills by working on my own. I am by and large a self-trained painter. I had a simple plan. I started to learn about color by working with colored pencils, then advanced to pastel and then to oil paint. I had a significant boost in skill from a visiting painter that I met when I was teaching art at Indiana University South Bend. Early paintings from the 80’s and 90’s were mostly about careful rendering of objects and a matching of natural color. They were quite precise, elegant, very satisfying, but quite slow. (See Still Life with Flowers) As my drawing matured, I was able to borrow a degree of expressiveness from my pastel work. (See Girl with a Newspaper) I also went through another period of meticulous rendering in the 2000’s and 2010’s. I had an exhibition titled Contemplations of some of this work in South Bend in the early 2000's. It was at The Spurious Fugitive gallery run by my friend and former student Scott Hatt. We had several successful shows here, and the experience was tremendously affirming. South Bend had never been a city with an active visual art culture, and his gallery provided me with a much-needed outlet. I had a later series of paintings revolving around the use of mantel pieces that resulted in some very refined work. (See An Interruption) After my retirement in 2013 I met a group of plein air painters who influenced me yet again. It was quite liberating. I stopped using pastels and started changing my approach in a wide variety of ways that helped me to merge my many tendencies into my present style. ( See After the Ball) If I were to describe what that means I’d have to say something like “I’m up for anything.”