Ericksen was born in the latter half of the 1900s. Teaching himself to draw in the pews of a conservative church in a southern border town, he found a passion and escape from his arid surroundings. By early adulthood he was avidly pursuing an education in painting and sculpture; however, it would be some time before he could find a vocation  in the arts and even longer still before he would escape the deserts of New Mexico. In the middle of his life he settled his family in south eastern Pennsylvania where he resumed painting the empty spaces he had always been drawn to. he now spends his remaining years in the attic of his century-old Colonial farm house creating images like these of places he reads and dreams about.