My dad gave me a cigar box filled with all his old pastels when I went away to college. I always had them to play around with. I learned to use them over time. Printmaking for me was largely a black and white affair, but I was taking classes in painting that, while largely uninformative, encouraged me to experiment with color. Sometimes I would break them out and have a go at it. My experiments with color took a major positive turn when I got my job at Indiana University South Bend in 1977. I was teaching observational drawing to first year students as well as figure drawing to advanced students and was getting loads of practice in. The program was heavily figure-centric. There were once-weekly figure drawing sessions that lasted three hours that I also often went to. Ultimately, I became a very capable figure drawer. This led inevitably to large figure work with pastels that started around 1989. (See Alcyone) My pastel collection grew and grew, and as my confidence and abilities increased the work became more compositionally evolved. I had always been fascinated by the Roman-inspired oil paintings of Alma Tadema and drew lots of azaleas. I had an Ionian chiton made that I used in many figure drawings during the late nineties and early 2000’s. (See Poetry Students or search Classical) I had an exhibition at the Thaddeus C Gallery in LaPorte Indiana called Dressing Up that was a culmination of this period. I visited numerous events where people gathered in costume for purposes of historical reenactment and just plain fun. I took photographs of people in their amazing get-ups and then executed large drawings of them. I also did a series of pastels of a model posing with a variety of game-playing equipment, hula hoops, skipping ropes, paddles and rackets for an exhibition entitled Wise and Foolish Games that was held at the Spurious Fugitive Gallery owned by my friend and former student Scott Hatt. I began to experiment with still lives in the late 2000’s both in painting and pastel. At first, I struggled with the whole idea of still life. I was bored with traditional still life material, ewers and fruit didn’t inspire me, and I began to build a rather remarkable collection of figurines and objects. This approach began to dominate my work as a painter as well. My father frequently designed vertical panels, and I learned to love that format from him. To my mind they seemed to soar rather than just sit. The pastel Time Piece is the best example from this time, but it was one of the last pastels that I made.