About Me

Painter of the California coast, and author of the novella The Light at Point Sur.

I was born in former Czechoslovakia, where I lived until 1985, when I fled the communist regime. I found my freedom in the USA, and I currently live in San Diego with my wife Siobhan Gazur who is an amazing portrait photographer and my daughter Vendela who is an amazing entertainer.   

I saw the ocean for the first time in my life in 1986 during my visit to Monterey Bay. This experience, and living along the California Coastline has greatly influenced my passion for the ocean, my direction in art, and of course endless pursuit to surf the perfect wave.

My art was influenced by Tibor Nagy an impressionist focused on landscapes and cityscapes and I am very fortunate to have met and studied with great artists including Adrian Gottlieb, Scott Christensen, Ron Lemen, Mau-kun Yim, Ruo Li, Jeffrey Watts, Gill Dellinger.

I love to paint the sea

My favorite model is the rugged coastal paradise of Pacific Coast, especially of Big Sur.

My paintings are my small contributions to current and future generations, as was the gift to me of artists of our past. I capture my whereabouts in my paintings of places and people I love; it’s my diary, my footsteps in life recorded each day. 

I paint primarily the sea on location 'plein-air'. I have to see it, breath it, touch it and fall in love with the scene to paint it. If you love something, it comes through in your art (and in life in general). Whether it is an early morning sun lighting up the sea, a huge wave crashing on the rock, fog rolling in from the sea, whatever first captured me to paint the scene I try to retain through the finish like an invisible layer.

Through my paintings I hope to share with you the ocean's endless beauty.

And then I wrote a book about it

For years I painted the coast below Point Sur without knowing what had happened there. Then I learned that in 1935 the USS Macon, a Navy airship nearly 800 feet long, one of the largest flying machines ever built, went down a few miles off that lighthouse, and that outside of Point Sur and Monterey, hardly anyone remembers it.

It struck me that this hard, beautiful coast had been keeping a secret. So I wrote The Light at Point Sur, story about that disaster, and a love story I built to carry it. It's set on the same Big Sur coast I've painted my whole life. The places in the book are the places in my paintings.