You didn’t come this far to stop

Artist Bio

My watercolor painting seems to engage my whole being: mind, body, spirit, and soul. Therefore, I call the very act of my watercolor painting "my spiritual practice." It's a vibrant expression of my love and passion for the subjects I feel drawn towards to paint.

I was born in South Korea and raised in a farming village. So, my roots are intricately intertwined with the nature as my very own flesh and blood.

As part of a family that owned fields and rice paddies, I ate off of those lands, as it were. When I walked home from my elementary school many miles away because we didn't have a car (no family in the whole region did), I walked another couple of miles, stepped into the muddy water, and did weeding, constantly plucking leeches (blood-sucking worms) off my legs and tossing them to the dry land. When the harvest time came, I helped my dad and other helpers from the village with harvesting rice, bundling the ripened rice plants into sheaves. When home, I would go over to the garden by the side of our house, gather leaves, yard trimmings, and food scraps on to our compost, and look after it until the next planting season. Thus, every day I lived in nature and with nature.

I walked to a next bigger town to a middle school, and then our family moved to Seoul, the Capital City of South Korea, so I could attend high school. And I went to a university there, graduating with a B.A, in English.

Then, at long last, fulfilling my long-time dream, I came to the United States of America, and studied at Harvard University Divinity School and completed my studies there with the Master of Divinity degree.

After many years of serving churches as pastor in a numbers of states and in Canada, I also worked with hospices in the East Coast as well as the West Coast.

What about my artwork? It had not seen the light of the day for practically all my life? Well, it had been set aside for the time being while I was doing all these many other things! Plus, raising a family! But my awareness of my divine gift of artistic creativity... it had never died, but been simmering, at times, boiling...

Then came the height of COVID-19 Pandemic! I was called into the office of the hospice I was working with as a chaplain in Santa Barbara, California then. I was told I was no longer needed and "leave the computer at the office and head for home."

Long story short, my wife and I took a long 3,000 mile drive eastward and arrived in Philadelphia's northeast suburbs. Through countless nights of tossing and turning and through many months of searching and checking, I took the courage to declare to the world, "I'm an artist!" Shortly thereafter I came across the following words of Vincent van Gogh: "If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced."