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Over the years, I've traveled to many places for inspiration and research, including Pennsylvania, Ohio, South Carolina, California, and Hawaii.

One of my favorite places on the planet is a place in northern Michigan: Long Lake in Traverse City.

Everything I've done in my career has started in and around Detroit, you know, the metro area and Michigan.

During the winter when the weather is too poor to work outside, I do use drawings and photographs, but I change my work so it is not just a time and place study.

I ended up working in Michigan for a young company called Sycor out of Michigan, worked there, and that company got bought by Northern Telecom. We became the Bell Northern Research Labs of Northern Telecom.

I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.

I do mostly Southern landscapes. I do beautiful old barns that are falling down, and beautiful trees reflecting in the water. My lovely wife Dorothy and I travel quite a bit, so I take pictures of different things that inspire me to come home, when I come home here in North Carolina, into my art studio and paint these things.

I lived the first five years of my life on a farm in Union City, Michigan, with my mom and grandparents. It was the most magical time of my life.

I'm a Texan. Some of me is still nestled up there in the Catskill Mountains: the summers I spent with my grandfather on the farm and the guys I played basketball with in high school. But then that was it.