Over the past 30 years, painting has been a great hobby, where I can spend hours thinking about designs, while away my free-time painting, and then enjoy my creations, and share them with others.

 Apart from a couple of classes at the Pacific Art League of Palo Alto, about 25 years ago, and a recent plein-air class with world-renowned Kathleen Dunphy, I am self-taught. It's my belief that, if you're diligent and observant, you can learn how to paint and draw - especially when you're doing so in your studio.

 When I moved to the Bay Area from Seattle, I quickly learned about a Carmel artist named Loren Speck, and that’s when I knew that’s how I want to paint. Look up his stunning work and you will see in his work what I was inspired to do beginning almost 30 years ago. Even then, though, I was inspired to paint realistically, and, inspired by Matisse and other Neo-impressionist artists to paint abstracts, and surrealistic, and Fauvist artworks.

 So from the start, I have been of two minds in my approach painting: Today, am I inspired to paint realistically? Or paint with more abstraction in space and modeling of forms like Van Gogh and Derain? This duality of approaches to painting has stuck with me, and you'll see it in my latest artworks. Some days, I take what I've learned from Sargent, David Leffel, and Speck, and paint representationally. And other days, I will be inspired by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gaugain, paintings by Matisse, de Vlaminck, and Derain, and modern day Fauvists.

 The French Fauvists had an agenda of painting much like Cezanne and Seurat, but added in greatly-separated brushstrokes, and highly-saturated (out-of-the tube) expressive colors to design space and forms. The wild choices in coloration should provoke in the user a sense of how the artist felt at the time the artist was painting. In my Fauvist artworks, I've added to the agenda the use of multi-colored contour lines and brightly-tinted underpaintings - portions of which show through in the final still-life or landscape painting. In this series, with design as my first priority, I feel a great deal of joy and pleasure in painting like this. And, I feel the final results are very satisfying.

 I hope you enjoy the results as much as I have enjoyed doing the work.  Marc Casad