Portfolio About the Artist Procedure & Fees Contact Home Also see other works at DreyerFineArts.com Your portait of our 3 sons has captured each of their individual spirits in the most amazingly accurate sense. Your keen artistic ability includes rigorous attention to detail in some of the most subtle and delightful ways. Please know that your work of art is the centerpiece of our home and never fails to bring joy when we see it. —Patricia Witte

"Blue Crab" Oil on Canvas A lifelong artist, with a penchant toward sculpture, I began painting professionally in 1994. It began with one mural at the request of my wife, which began the requests, by word of mouth, for well over a hundred murals in private residences, government buildings and churches. For the next 10 years or so, I worked quickly, drawing everything with sweeping free hand drawing and developing my paintings in acrylic glazes of color, building depth and dimension with each pass. I have always been a representational artist and focused my depiction of scenes and subjects with a high degree of accuracy, regardless of the constraints of time or budget I was put under. The result was the quite unintentional development of a number of painting techniques which created the desire to translate them to more intensive and challenging studies on smaller canvases. The transition to oils expanded my ability to create greater depth and continuity within my work. I work extensively with alkyd oils, which give me the glazing advantages of acrylic, while providing me the flexibilty and luminosity of a true oil. While I have formally studied art, taking figure drawing and related courses at St. Louis University, the New School of Design in New York, and in various workshops through the years, my three degrees are in social work, urban studies and law. My initial academic interest, and my entire pre-portraiture career, was focused on the study of human beings and their interactions. I first began studying the science of nonverbal communication in counseling psychology and first applied it to a self portrait in 1979. I was quite honored when 28 years later, a portrait created with this approach, was made part of the permanent collection of The St. Louis University Museum of Art. I was ultimately urged by friends to attempt portraiture, having no idea at the time that it would lead to my singular pursuit. What I now realize, is that it was my consistent study and fascination with people, combined with my love and talent for art, that led me naturally to my career as an oil portraitist. Understanding and duplicating the emotional signals inherent in the subject and visually relaying them to stimulate an emotional response in the viewer goes beyond artistic knowledge and is why I believe portraiture is so difficult for many otherwise talented artists. My professional background and the empathetic ability to read and interact with people, makes me quite comfortable in both the personal and professional portrait sector. I have painted distinguished individuals in law, business, government, education and the ministry.

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