I grew up in a working-class Irish family where art wasn’t considered a career—it was a luxury. I stopped drawing when I was four and a half, the day I first went to school. For fifty years, I carried images inside me without a language to express them.

At fifty-eight, I began to draw again—awkwardly at first, like a child learning to speak after years of silence. What emerged surprised me: color that felt alive, lines that carried feeling more than reason.

My work now bridges two homes—Portland, Oregon, and a restored 1830s schoolhouse in Ireland—and two lifetimes: the boy who stopped creating, and the man who began again.

I paint and draw to honor that small boy, and to remind others that creativity never leaves us. It just waits for the moment we’re ready to listen.