I was born a double Gemini in Port O’Spain, Trinidad, the isle of hummingbirds (and singing frogs, or so I'm told), with a Mercury-Uranus-Sun conjunction in my rising sign. We soon made a series of moves: to Panama, Florida, New York. My parents bought a new house in Levittown, the archetype of mass-produced post-war suburbs. I remember the highlight of pre-school being finger painting, loving both the color and feel of the paint and how it looked on the huge sheets of paper on the wall. My father was transferred to an air force base in England, and in 1950 and we moved to Northwood in the suburbs of London.

When I was five I won an international coloring contest for American children in Europe, using wax crayons to color a daily black and white cartoon published in the London Times.   My picture ran on the front page of the London Times and I had a small taste of fame.  I began school at the age of five at a convent school run by German and Irish nuns, who were very kind to their token Yank until I almost burned the school down by accidentally kicking over a ceramic gas heater. Luckily there was more smoke than fire. We moved back to the US and lived in Montgomery, Alabama, where I was taunted by my classmates for speaking with a British accent and being able to read better than the other children. We moved to northern Virginia where I lived until graduating from high school and moving to Texas where my parents retired and I entered college.

I lived with two fine art (BFA) students for the last 3 years in my undergraduate studies in Austin, at the University of Texas.   Though I was studying science, physics and English literature, I spent a lot of my time in the Art Department, studying in the art library or going with Stephen and Pamela to art department functions, parties, faculty dinners, openings in Austin and Dallas.   After graduation we moved to New York where both Stephen (Mueller) and Pamela (Jenrette) and I became part of (me somewhat reluctantly, having always been very shy) of the Factory Crowd, emerging from our shared loft on Canal Street every night after 11:00 pm to join the "beautiful people" at Max’s Kansas City in the backroom eating chick peas mostly (we were broke).   From the first month we arrived, in June 1969 we became somewhat notorious among the Warhol crowd as the “Texas menage a trios”.

Of this mysterious trio from Austin, I was the quiet one. Pamela and Stephen both became very active at the Factory on Union Square, trying to help Andy in various projects. There were several dozen people always available (self volunteered) to help.   I had found an engineering job with the Port of New York Authority where I ended up working on floor 64 of the North Tower of the World Trade Center for the next five years.   When we first went to the Factory, which was then across Union Square from Max's Kansas City, I was surprised to see Andy sitting alone at the entrance to a very small room across from the elevator. His office wasn't much bigger than a small storage closet!   He was very casual and just waved at the three of us saying "Hi!". I was surprised that there were no doors or barriers at all between the elevator and the open studio and his office, even though he had been shot in the chest by Valarie Solanis less than a year earlier.

We went to the Factory almost every day, just to meet people and watch what was going on. Most of the work was silkscreening, done by Jed Johnson and Gerard Malanga, it seemed. Andy spent all of his time talking to people who wandered in, or on the telephone. I did notice that he was an idea generator, always coming up with ideas for things for people to do, and he always seemed to be so extremely positive and encouraging of everyone. Eventually he grew famililar with the three of us and invited us (and Steven Mueller) to his brownstone uptown, where he lived with his Polish mother. When he at last discovered that I had just earned an engineering degree, he really seemed excited and asked me if I would mind helping him a bit with a few projects dealing with lighting and film. His biggest hope at that time was somehow having his own television show in which he would simply show his videos. One day he told me he was going to lunch with several executives from CBS and asked if I would come along "to talk technical things." We ate at Max's of course, a free lunch from CBS. The project soon stalled for a number of reasons, but Andy continued to retain me as his "technical consultant", though of course I never asked for, nor received, any money!

I had finished a light sculpture in 1968 at the University of Texas, part of a collaboration between the art department and engineering department, so I was really interested in creating kinetic light sculpture. When I first saw one of Dan Flavin’s work, I think at a gallery on 57th street I was really excited, but quickly felt that I could do much better with my knowledge of physics and laser communication theory, and that his installations (he didn't even do them himself, he had an electrician install commercial fluorescent fixtures with colored lamps). What I really wanted to do was create kinetic light sculptures using lasers. But Andy suggested I try painting instead, in fact he told me one day that he wished he had the talent to create abstract works, but he just didn't know how to think abstractly! He suggested I try painting abstract images based on my knowledge of mathematics. It initially thought he was kidding, and maybe he was! But particularly after seeing the incredible Kandinsky’s and Pollock’s at MOMA and the Guggenheim and Whitney, and reading Kandinsky’s “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, I began doing small water colors. At one point I showed a number of them to Andy and he said how lovely they were and I offered to give them to him (hoping he might reciprocate!), and so he took my first collection of paintings. I have no idea where they are now, perhaps in his estate collection somewhere.

At the same time I was getting more into fasting and lost about thirty pounds. I noticed myself talking faster and thinking quicker and a great number of plans emerged. My relationship with Stephen and Pamela suffered, somewhat to their being irritated that I had begun painting, but probably more because they began considering me an additional bit of competition. Once when the three of us were in a photographer’s studio, Ruspoli Rodriquez, above Carnegie Hall, in walked two French women, an ocelot on a leash, and Salvador Dali! After a lot of speaking in French and people interacting and wandering around, one of the French women came over to me and invited me to a lunch the next noon at Trader Vics with Salvador Dali. She said he had asked her to urge me to attend his luncheon for eight or nine people. The next day I found myself sitting between Helmut Berger, who had recently starred in“The Damned”, a movie set in Berlin in Nazi Germany. To my right was Elsa Peretti, a jewelry designer. It was a wonderful luncheon, but I was my usual shy self and likely just invited because I was a pretty thing back then, at the ripe old age of 24. At about that time I was invited to become a model and join a tour soon to begin of the northeast states. I was flattered, but being shy and having a full time engineering job that, boring as it was, paid quite well, I soon declined.

Our closest friends at the time, at least close friends of Stephen Mueller and Pamela, were Billy Sullivan and his wife, an heiress of a large publishing firm. Billy never finished high school but he was very charming, extremely social and was trying to be a painter using air brushes, trying to coax photo realism effects with his airbrushes, but having a difficult time. He seemed more interested in partying than working, and with a millionaire wife, I imagine he felt little pressure to work hard.

At the time I began living on my own, I became close for awhile to Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, who were a couple at the time, living together on the second floor of the Chelsea in a single room not much larger than 20 ft by 10 feet! I visited them frequently as I was trying to establish my own gallery and Robert was interested in exhibiting his sculptures (at the time his photography was his secondary art), most of which consisted of leather and ox skull and jockey strap triptych altar sort of sculptures. I had plans to do very large canvases of my own and exhibit them in my own gallery along with art of my friends. I rented the third floor at 32 Greene Street, a half a block north of Canal Street, where my grandfather had piloted a milk barge from New Jersey to Brooklyn, it was a real canal back then. He was the youngest person who ran a team of six large horses pulling the barge!

Back then Soho did not have the meaning it has now, it was just an industrial neighborhood south of Houston Street. I liked it because I was close to Chinatown and I loved wandering the neighborhood. It was also close to Little Italy, and the Feast of San Genaro Festival in the fall was one of my most vivid and pleasant experiences of those days, which was very difficult. There was no heat during weekends at 32 Greene street, and so I grew very very cold indeed. And I was working with no funds but all my own labor to paint the 18 foot high walls white and sand and finish the floors of a 100 ft by 30 ft industrial loft. It slowly wore me down and I finally ran out of funds and energy and motivation. I returned to Texas in the fall of 1970 and lived for several months alone in a family vacation trailer in the country hillside of Texas, near an Austin lake. I began painting canvases again and in early 1971 was asked to participate in a group show in Dallas. I had been trying to get a paper chromatography effect on raw canvas by spreading thin color layers and modulating them with gravity flow by angling the canvas in various ways and also in using melting ice cubes. After the Dallas show I was re-motivated to return to New York, resume my job with the Port Authority engineering department (they had kindly given me a leave of absence), and I felt I was ready to paint seriously while working full time as a lighting engineer.

I rented a small loft on Avenue A and East 6th Street in Manhattan, and filled up almost the entire floor or my main room with canvases I worked on. I eventually moved to a larger loft a block away where I painted most of my 8 ft x 10 ft canvases. During three years or so I stopped hanging out with artists at Max’s, I became very private and non-social, preferring to paint and to go to museums and galleries to observe paintings. I also worked full time as a lighting engineer for the port authority, and became very knowledgeable of the physics of light, of lighting fixtures and the architectural/biological aspects of light and color and how artificial light interacts with materials. I also experimented with a wide variety of chemicals and how they interacted with acrylic paint and liquids and how heat lamps and gravity affected various painting techniques. I became increasingly interested in texture and color and archetypal shapes. I also studied a great deal in the areas of Asian philosophy and religions as well as Jungian psychology. I obtained a full set of Jung’s Collected Works, and I attended lectures and workshops with practicing experts in Asian and western meditation, including Allan Watts, Oscar Ichazo, John Lilly, Trungpa Rinpoche, all of whom visited New York frequently in those days, and I studied hatha yoga at the Integral Yoga Institute at their center in the Village, where I had first heard Swami Saccidananda speak upon arriving in New York the summer of 1969. I especially resonated with his name, which he described in a lecture as being grounded in the fact that the Trinity can be seen expressed in all things, and to me being from the island of Trinidad (the Trinity), this seemed especially significant. Later, studying more deeply in graduate school in San Francisco, I discovered how very deeply the Trinity is to be found not only in Indian philosophy but in physics and Christianity, and many other areas of inquiry.

When I felt I had a sufficient number of high quality works that I was ready to show in a gallery. With a bit of hubris I assumed that what was good to me (my own works) would be obviously fantastic to gallery owners. I bought a very expensive Nikon camera and took slides of my work. After sending sets of slides to four or five galleries with no replies at all, I became worried. At the time I was doing a great deal of fasting and hatha yoga and meditation, and when I found out that Peter Max was doing a benefit show to raise money for the Integral Yoga Institute, I sent a set of my slides to the Institute, saying I would volunteer whichever paintings Peter Max thought would be suitable to include with the show. I received absolutely no reply, to my surprise, and then my hopes just skidded to a halt. I gave up and decided that my reward in creating paintings were in the experience itself, that Dewey’s ideas in “Art As Experience” (which I read several times in the early 70s) were right on the mark, that the true art, at least my art, was primarily “in the experience”. A sort of healing cathartic experience of in communion with the gods themselves, with reality itself, as undiluted a possible.

I decided to quit New York and move to San Francisco to study full time, without working in an office, on a study of Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy, and more especially to find a spiritual community or commune to join, to make my life more authentic I moved to San Francisco and was able to live for three years as a full time student on my savings, studying Sanskrit for three years, gaining deeper experiences in meditation, but I continued to paint on a much smaller scale, small canvases.

I received an M.A. in Indian Philosophy in 1977, having written and published my Thesis: "The History, Philosophy and Practice of Tantra in India", inspired by a lifelong interest in yoga, meditation and art. During my graduate studies, I married a student from Mexico who had lived with Maria Sabina in Oaxaca, a curandera. At the times I was involved in psychotropic mushroom ceremonies and used them in conjunction with beginning a new painting on full moon nights. For awhile I had worked in the Registrar’s Office at the Calif. Institute of Asian Studies, but upon graduation and having our first child, I applied for and was accepted as Registrar of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where I worked for two years until we joined Saudi ARAMCO and in 1980, just at the beginning of all-out war between Iraq and Iran, we flew to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on the western shore of the Arabian Gulf, then for an hour drive inland toward Abqaiq ("Where the Young Camels Sport"), on the edge of the Saudi Arabian coastal desert with our two children, Jason age 2 and Alyssa age 3 months.

I continued painting in Saudi Arabia, though at first found it difficult to obtain paint and more especially canvas. During the day I worked as a software developer, generating graphical reports for Aramco management. Home was five minutes away from work, and there was only one TV channel, which went on the air at 5:00pm and signed off at 10:00pm. We were a very nuclear family and had two cats, Allie and Joshua. We often went out into the desert, where the sand was so old it was dustlike and when it blew in the wind in the shamaliya season, there were often whiteouts, as if we were in the Arctic barrens in the wind.

Living in the desert was a purifying experience. I grew much closer to the spirit of simplicity and became very active in an underground Christian community (in which participation was a violation of Saudi Law), and began studying and practicing contemplation early in the morning and late at night. Being in close proximity to India, I was able to visit Madras (now renamed Chennai) several times and I spent time at a monastery on the banks of the Cauvery River, a holy river there, and was able to study and pray with Fr. Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine priest who had studied at Cambridge and had lived in India for decades.

In 1992 I managed to acquire a large piece of land with medieval ruins in the quiet countryside five miles north of the town of Assisi, Italy, on which stands twelfth century church ruins and a fifteenth century stone tower which I renovated. I hope someday to live there in the quiet natural setting of Umbria, but increasingly have been thinking of living in northern California.

In 2007 I began searching for a teacher with whom I could study traditional Russian icon painting (called "writing" by iconographers). After some difficulty, I discovered Vladislav Andrejev's school of iconology (http://www.prosoponschool.org/) which holds workshops in the U.S.A. (though mostly the East coast), England, Italy, and Russia.

The practice of creating an icon in a state of contemplative prayer, often saying the Jesus Prayer silently, or better, maintaining ever more perfect inner silence, has been transformative in many ways. In addition, study of various writings from the Philokalia over the past decade, and the first hand experience of the rich heritage that I discovered in Russian liturgies during my travels in Russia, with the overwhelming kindness, patient love, and intelligence that I have experienced from individuals and within the Orthodox community in Russia, England, and the U.S., has led me gradually closer and closer toward Orthodoxy in general and Russian Orthodoxy in particular. I have been fortunate in having been able to visit Russia twice, in 2007 and 2011, travelling with other iconographers to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vladimir, Rostov, Pskov, Novgorod and the Pechory Cave Monastery, and other smaller sites with medieval icons, and I am fortune in living not far from the oldest Russian orthodox cathedral in the continental United States, Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco.

In recent years my painting activity has increased as well as my interior life and contemplative practice.
In 2010 I entered a PhD program in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

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