Sacred art has been a lifelong preoccupation, judging from the earliest sketch of mine my mother saved. It is a pencil illustration of Jesus' parable about "The Sower and the Seed" (in a style not unlike that of Cy Twombly!), drawn when I was a child, attending a Baptist Church Sunday School in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s.

Whatever my early artistic interests, my professional career centered on words, not images. After earning a B.A from the University of Virginia and an M.A from Columbia University in literature (with a brief interlude at the University of Leningrad to study Russian), I joined the staff of TIME Magazine in 1975, working for the American newsweekly for over twenty years as an Associate Editor in New York, and, later, as a foreign correspondent in Germany and the USSR (which became Russia, again, during my eight-year stint as Moscow Bureau Chief, covering the perestroika era.)

	Art remained a constant in my life. Along with reporter notebooks, I often carried a sketch pad, drawing landscapes-with lots of churches!-which caught my eye during my travels.
When I took what became a permanent sabbatical from journalism in 1996 to settle on the island of Cyprus, I realized the study and making of art was my real love and vocation.

And so it has been for the last decade. With the exception of studio art courses in high school, I have no formal art training. I hope, a love of art history and a passion for my subjects help make up for any technical shortcomings. My medium of choice is Prisma color pencil sketching, but I enjoy mixing various media, experimenting with different styles and genres. Many of the artworks featured in this website was shown at the "Lenten Reflections Exhibition," held the spring of 2006 at the John & Friends Art Studio in Tala, Cyprus.