Welcome — I'm glad you're here.
Before the Navy, I was a draftsman and technical illustrator with Engineering School on the horizon. Then the draft called my number, and I made a decision: I joined the Navy.
Over the next twenty years, I served aboard the USS Frederick (LST-1184); with the Field Command, Defense Nuclear Agency; the Iceland Defense Force; the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Nuclear Warfare Status Branch; Maritime Prepositioning Ships Squadron One; Patrol Squadron 24; and retired out of Helicopter Training Squadron One. Twenty years. Multiple commands. Corners of the world most people never see.
Life aboard ship left little room for a canvas. But Iceland changed that.
Stationed at the NATO base at Keflavik, I found the time — and the landscape — to paint in earnest. For nine months out of the year, Iceland is in the dark, but those summer months brings out the sun in the sky 24/7. The light there is unlike anything else: long, low, and relentless in the way it falls across volcanic rock and open water. It was in Iceland that I founded the Keflavik Artist Society, bringing together fellow artists who understood that some places demand to be painted.
When I retired, the canvas came with me.
The subjects that drive my work come from a lifetime of travel — Antarctica, the American West, the Southern states, Europe, and beyond. I carry a camera everywhere, and over the years I've built an extensive photography collection from these journeys. That photography feeds directly into the paintings: a composition spotted in Antarctica, a light condition caught in the desert and the rockies, a moment in the Deep South that a phone snapshot can hold but only a painting can truly keep.
I work in acrylics, watercolors, pastels, pen and ink, and oils — whatever the subject calls for. Every original is painted one at a time, by hand. No editions. No reproductions. Each piece exists once, and only once. I do take commissions.
If you want to follow the travels that inspire the work, I document them on my YouTube channel — youtube.com/@ceciltheartist.
If something on these walls speaks to you, it's because it spoke to me first. That's where every piece starts.
Browse, explore, and if you find something that feels like yours — it probably is.
— Cecil