And I’m an artist. A career graphic designer for print, web and video. Easing my way into “analog” fine art.

I lived my first half-century in Westchester and Putnam Counties, NY., then on to Havertown, PA. Since September of 2022, we live in Lancaster County, the setting for Weird Al Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise.” Not a day goes by when I don’t either see or hear a horse. Our view is a 50-acre cornfield.

I left my final W-2 job in November of 2008, at the peak of the housing crash. Not a good time to have been an employee of a Gannett newspaper. Freelanced ever since. I was already living the life of a telecommuter when the pandemic hit.

I’ve been playing with and in the past since 1988 when I met my wife Denise, who’d been in the Society for Creative Anachronism (a medievalist group) for years. Moving to the suburbs of Philadelphia in 2011 brings one to all the Revolutionary sites, and we, being good history nerds, took them all in. But it was a particular Battle of Brandywine in 2017 (its 240th anniversary) that Revolutionary War re-enactors pulled out all the authenticity stops in ways the SCA never could. Hundreds of people, dozens of encampments, and not so much as a water cup out of period. And in the place where that particular history occurred, and could still be felt, resonating through the ground where you stand.

So since then, my wife Denise and I attend Revolutionary War battles and Colonial living history festivals, demonstrating printing, wood engraving, and quill writing.