I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the following:

I have been influenced by opera, as this was my father's first love as a performing operatic baritone. When I was old enough to crawl, my favorite place was under the grand piano. He also introduced me to the game of mumblety peg, and eating sardines from the can on saltine crackers. Some of my favorite memories were when he took me to San Francisco: We saw the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company performing "Gilbert and Sullivan's" H.M.S. Pinafore. During many San Francisco foggy summer nights we would see Turk Murphy's Jazz Band at “Earthquake McGoon’s” on Broadway. When his singing career fell short he became a police officer, a kind of jump to the other pole of his personality.

My mom, who desired to be a movie star had to settle for florist, mother, and part-time explorer and attractor of odd peoples. She introduced me to Catholicism and my spirituality as well as a love for the odd and bizaare things in life: Juanita Musson, one of Northern-California's most infamous restaurateurs was frequent enough on our rounds that I remember it as quite a huge deal for me. We would go to her place up at Fetters Hot Springs to casually mix with Hell's Angels, goats, chickens, and a monkey or two at her restaurant. When not on the road in her 1960 Jaguar MKIX mom was rubbing elbows with the 1970's counter-culture of Berkeley's Telegraph Ave. My parents were completely crazy and opposites in their own ways, as am I, stuck between the poles of power and control and the naive. May they both rest in peace. A special thanks to my aunt Angie Murray for helping in my mothers care during her declining years, and at the very end when my mother passed in her arms. A debt of love and gratitude I can never begin to repay.

My brother Rod, with his 52 years of artistic, personal, professional, practical, and financial encouragement is a major force in how the photographic chapter of my life has unfolded. It was at his apartment on Turk Street in San Francisco during the late sixties that I was introduce to film and the smells of 16mm and 35mm films soaking in developer, stop bath, and fixer. My facination with my brothers' work led me to many occassions by his side, over the years, on the lots of Warner Bros., Universal Studios, sound stages in Burbank, back lot exploration, the spotting of movie stars, and location shoots. This created a yearning to be like him and do what he did. As an established Hollywood film and television director it was always implied that if he could succeed in the visual arts so could I. Thanks, Bro!

A shout out of great importance goes to my beautiful and gifted wife Yvonne. Without her special gifts of love the tread of my artistic life would have never hit the road again, xoxoxo.

I would like to thank my good Friend professorThomasRiley for his encouragement to return to university to complete my degree in philosophy and pursue my other love, the love of helping others. He encouraged me to enter graduate school and complete an advanced degree in Clinical Psychology. Through this professional affiliation I have had income through the tough times when my creative and artistic efforts were derailed, sometimes for years at a time. Counseling is a vocation that will always exist together with photography. Both photography and counseling allow me to practice the talents of my art most completely.

As much as every photographer can say his work was influenced by this master or that, my artistic and intellectual influences were mostly introduced outside the world of photography. Abstract Expressionism, and most personally the Kandinsky like images that would bounce around in my mind during the dissociative episodes of an early adulthood where rubber never met the road. The images were like guardian angels protecting my psyche from disintegration. I came to recognize the latent image of my own psychological struggles in his work. My works have also been influenced by the ideas of philosophy, my undergraduate pursuit. Martin Heidegger's Being and time, The Origin of the Work of Art, and The Question Concerning Technology; Karl Jaspers' Philosophy of Existence, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. The 19thcentury philosophy movement helped me understand my own relationship with degridation, decay, existence, and especially, finding beauty in it all as a transformative element. I owe a profound gratitude to Pete Walker and Gloria Reese both excellent psychotherapist/healers for seeing me through some of my darkest moments in life, giving my psyche respit and so to overcome those things keeping my life frozen in the headlights of my past. Jesus and Buddha, thank you for helping me when nothing else seemed to work.

This is a complex matrix of ideas and influences that power my love for the creation of art as well as ideas. As I move into this new chapter of my life, working with the abstract photographic image, I feel I am in great company and in great spirits. My life and art would not be the same without any one of these ingredients, and yes, I am more than the sum of my parts.