I was born in Vermont in a house owned by Robert Frost. The St. Johnsbury Athanaeum, our local library, has a remarkable collection of Hudson River paintings – including Bierdstadt’s largest work, and landscapes by Thomas Cole, Sanford Gifford and Asher Durand.

I came to New York City for a BFA in Drawing at Pratt Institute and graduated with honors in 1978. Through the eighties and nineties, I pioneered a loft and I was active in alternative art spaces in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I created and directed the Visual Arts Program in Prospect Park from 1983 to 1993. I was also curator of the One Main Sculpture Space in Brooklyn for a decade. In the late 80’s, I visited the Catskills and began to seek out artist residencies that would bring me back into the mountains, from whence comes my strength.

In 1988 I came to Palenville, NY (where Asher Durand painted for many summers), and drew the waterfalls. In Palenville, I was grappling with the problem of depicting rocky waterfalls in black and white. I hit upon the idea of making them in collaged fragments. I have been developing this technique ever since. My collages are made of hundreds of bits of paper glued into position like fragments in a mosaic. I made the works first only in black & white. In 1990, I won a Pollock-Krasner Grant for this series. I make them now in color. “Moss Glen Falls, Granville, VT” and “The Harder They Come” are recent works made in this technique.

To create these collages, I begin out of doors. I carry a portable kit of watercolor and gouache into the forest. I make an on-site rendering or watercolor and/or gouache painting not larger than 12 X 16”. The paintings convey information about what I saw. Perhaps more importantly, they also interpret the emotional and spiritual landscape. In the studio I make larger versions of the field drawings. As I translate a painting into a collage, I emphasize edges of forms and depth of landscape space. Layers of paint, paper, and charcoal create surfaces to emulate textures of rock, water and foliage. Drawing is always at the heart of the work. They are up to 92” in size.

My works are in corporate collections and museums including Pfizer and Philip Morris, the City Museum of Gelsenkirchen, Germany and the Zimmerli Museum in New Jersey. I have won residencies in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Banff, Canada and Tuscany, Italy. In America I have been AIR at Dorland Mt. Arts Colony in California, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, The Weir Farm in Connecticut, Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico and others.