Brief Bio
My initial plans were to obtain a BFA and MFA, however those plans were cut short at the beginning of the senior year of my BFA program when a local state trooper caught me on date with the man who is currently my husband. The trooper reported us to the school and we were forced out because we were queer.
After moving to the east coast to build a new life for ourselves, I returned to school at Old Dominion University where I designed, proposed, and completed an interdisciplinary degree in Arts Administration, which I followed with a Masters of Business Administration at the Graduate School of Management, UC Davis. After working in corporate America for several years to support myself while pursuing my art on weekends and weeknights, I left the workforce in early 2024 and have been able to focus exclusively on my art full time.
Artist Statement
My work is the visual depiction of an inner journey that is often triggered by my synesthetic experience with music and literature. Although my journey in life has been that of a queer artist trying to find his place in the world, the need to find one’s place, and the beauty and strangeness one finds on that journey are not unique to queer people. I hope that my work can provide a bridge between the larger community and queer experience, but I also hope that irrespective of my queer background the work will resonate with any viewer – queer, straight, or otherwise – that spends time contemplating the beauty and strangeness of the inner world human mind and its simultaneous ties to, and distance from outer lived experience.
My work exists in the ambiguous zone between abstraction and representation, exploring how we negotiate our relationship with worlds, both physical and conceptual, that are comprised a succession of images unfolding over time. The hope is to create a visual experience that is suggestive enough to engender a conversation with the viewer while leaving ample space for the viewer’s unique experience, knowledge, and sentiments to become a part of that conversation.
My sources of inspiration are varied and include synesthetic responses to both music and literature, as well as the forms of other organisms that inhabit our planet, all of which I think of in the context of the work of other artists, past and present, and the writings of philosophers and theorists.
Compositions often begin, whether drawings, prints, or paintings, with imagery that is triggered by listening to a piece of music or reading the words in a novel or poem. My imagination is also frequently taken by the varied natural imagery of the natural world, often drawn to the strange and beautiful creatures found in deep or black water dives, or those wriggling around on a slide under a microscope.
Once these images start to take physical form on paper or canvas then the work takes on a life and direction of its own, and the question becomes how to respond to it: to the colors, forms, and movements already drawn or painted, in a way to that builds upon my initial thinking and vision.
As the work grows over time, other influences seep in, for example: the thinking of Henri Bergson about a conscious being’s perception of the accumulation of time; the cacophony of voices and images in contemporary visual arts. The writings of other critics and philosophers have also informed my practice, such as Gianni Vattimo’s ideas in The End of Modernity.
In the end, my objective is to create a visual experience that is both challenging and inviting, rife with inferences but welcoming to the viewer’s unique experience, addresses the concepts of beauty and joy while not forfeiting a certain level of mystery.
A Note on Titles: In order to create titles that were conceptually consistent with my objective of creating imagery that is an open yet suggestive abstract matrix, and in a nod to the Dadaists, I developed a rubric to pull random syllables from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which is a remarkable piece of literature in which words create an open yet suggestive matrix.