About Me

I was born in Chicago, on January 7, 1952, the Year of the Rabbit.

I became a devotee of aesthetics as a very young child in my living room, trance-dancing with boundless enthusiasm and soulful energy to ballet suites and R&B. The power of artistic ritual pulled me enraptured into a creative flow, deep into a river of personal truth. I had discovered my artistic nature. After a childhood marked by the death of a parent, at 18 I moved to NYC to become a modern dancer. For ten years I studied and performed both onstage as dancer and backstage as choreographer, stagehand, and stage manager. Through the 80s and 90s I worked as a coordinator on commercials and rock videos at a film editing house, and as a set dresser for indie films. I used found materials to design and construct theatrical installations for a dance company and for roving NY dance parties. In 1998 I enrolled in SVA's Illustration program, emerging four years later with honors and a BFA.

About my work

Art making is my personal theater of communicative expression. I see images as staged or theatrical scenes. Ideas incarnate and enact stories within the proscenium of the picture plane. My works are organic narratives generated from a seed idea that grows a visual story, painted as a series of pictures or a single image. My work is often colorful, playful and humorous. Yet beneath the sometimes childlike tendency to amuse myself beats a melancholy heart, sensitized to loss and the fragile beauty of all life. I have a fierce desire to lend dignity through portraiture to ephemera. I make personal, ceremonial icons.

I am always experimenting with new mediums, finding the form which best follows function, content, and meaning. Styles abound, rebound, evolve, and revolve.

Lately I've discovered automatic painting. Variously called "visionary" or "meditative" or "gestalt," it is the spontaneous emergence of an evolving image without forethought, judgment, or self-censorship. When working in this vein, all my mundane and habitual thoughts fade to the background; the painting becomes the world. A meditative dialogue develops between me and the picture. In the clarity of a spacious, visual, and spontaneous conversation, an idea takes shape, forming surprising and familiar creatures and designs. Personal meaning surfaces.