Born in Milwaukee in 1946, I was raised some 10 miles south in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in the shadow of a smoke-belching, coal-fired power plant and downwind of the Peter Cooper glue works.  As a kid I enjoyed drawing - mostly airplanes, battleships and copying cartoon characters with my cousin who was better at it. He dropped out of high school to join the Marines and never finished his formal education.  I left for college at age 17 at the urging of my parents and never returned.  Serial residencies in Madison, Wisconsin; West Germany; California, and New York all proved more amenable and energizing.  I received unrelated degrees in history and studio art from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) (1968;1976).  That was a period of rebellion and reflection: the onset of the decline of the rust belt, race riots in Milwaukee, anti-war demonstrations and the bombing of the Army Math Research Center on campus, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and, for me, four years grudging service with the U.S. Air Force as a newspaper writer/editor at a northern tier air base on the mostly frozen shores of Lake Superior.  In my spare time I churned out dystopian, photo-realist drawings which were lost to time and multiple relocations.  I was never one to save old books or drawings.  After leaving the military in 1973, I toured Europe on a pauper's budget and extended my stay to study art under a well-regarded if decidedly old-school West German printmaker by the name of Woldemar Winkler.  Herr Winkler was seeking an American art student to serve as his graduate assistant and translator for an upcoming visiting professorship he was negotiating with the University of Iowa.  I jumped at the opportunity.  Winkler, however, changed his mind within a year after finally acknowledging that he might need to learn a smidgen of English and not long thereafter I returned to the United States.  Short as that experience was I remember it well, for everything I ever learned of any value in relation to art came from the heart and soul of Herr Winkler.  Stop with the schlock! he would scream at me. Work from nature!  Observe! Draw and paint what your eyes see, not what your brain thinks is there! But I had some trouble seeing beyond my looming impoverishment and within two years abandoned the life of a struggling artist to take up the study of law in California where I worked my way through law school.  Post graduation I served as a law clerk to a federal judge in San Francisco.  Passing up an opportunity to become a prosecuting attorney in the Bay Area, I looked eastward for opportunity, landing in New York City where I obtained a graduate degree in taxation (1985) from the NYU school of law.  I worked the next 22 years as an attorney and tax manager at the financial services conglomerate Citicorp/Citgroup where it dawned on me that the processes involved in practicing tax law and making art are not all that different. I married my wife (M.D./Ph.D./oncologist and a fan of art, music, theatre and sports) in 1992.  With the 1993 birth of our daughter, we left New York City for the green suburbs of north-central New Jersey where my dormant artistic itch reasserted itself.  Family life and pleasant surroundings yielded a sunnier outlook, so I began again -- recording in color and chalk strokes the daily pattern of family life and documenting the bucolic and visual pleasures of New Jersey horse country.  (When in doubt, always return to nature.)  After early retirement in 2007, I taught federal income tax part-time at Fairleigh Dickinson University until 2016 while simultaneously exploring chalk/pastel on paper, branching into oil painting, displaying my work (and selling occasionally) at local art and charity events. I now split my time between residences in New York City and East Hampton.  Convinced that there are real (if not readily apparent) similarities between the processes that govern the practice of law and production of art, I have returned to my roots in an attempt to prove my thesis.