Bradley W. Schenck was born in California; but he's recently been caught up in an eastbound migration that's finally landed him in northeastern Ohio.

His intimidating last name is originally Dutch. His ancestors settled in New England when it was still called New Holland, and they remained mad enough about the name change that they fought a war against the English a hundred and forty years later.

It may be because of his two Irish American grandmothers that he wandered into Celtic art; already working as an artist by 1979, he ran across a copy of George Bain's Celtic Art: The Methods of Construction and began to explore traditional and Celtic Revival styles in his own work. At that time, this was all in ink and watercolor.

While Bain was seminal, Bradley gives perhaps even more credit to John G. Merne's A Handbook of Celtic Ornament in forming his own take on Celtic design. Merne's Celtic Revival style adopts some features of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements in a very natural way and the nature of that (brief) book is less inclined to mathematical diagrams, and more to giving an artist ideas about how to fill spaces with original knotwork.

But ask him who his favorite artist is, in the Celtic vein, and he'll sit you down and tell you about the little-published Art O'Murnaghan ( Brian Kells), who worked on a modern day illuminated manuscript in the early 20th century and whose work, housed now in the National Museum of Ireland, seems to make Bradley glow. He hopes to see it first hand one day.

Bradley's had a varied career, as many creative people do, with jobs as a draftsman and sign painter, at a retail window design company, and then seventeen years in the computer games industry as an artist, game designer, and art director.

Today, he says, he lives by his wits. This seems to involve selling his own work online and the occasional freelance commission.