Artist Statement: ( What I do )
The first act: to perform the ritual of mixing and preparing the paint, because the love for the medium is what sustains my interest. Its magical, even after thousands of years of iterations.
The second: to make something intelligible in a ‘language’, in a perceptual, representational, narrative style, drawing on the sub-conscience to provide the relationships and meanings to the pairing of disparate characters, and spaces, and yet speaking to a timeless ethos.
My traditional technique and inclination for the beautiful, lets me flex socially acceptable muscles in a slight of hand that allows the deviant to slip in. I enjoy the deceitful act of painting visually recognizable forms into ludicrous theater. In its audacious tri-axial goals of entertaining, informing and perplexing us, in service of contemporary socio-geo-political criticism and excavation of the mind, I think my art is meaningful.
Life is frequently chaotic and wacky. But, it has a purpose. I’m not smart enough to know the purpose but, I enjoy observing its seemingly infinite variations on its rhythms. I love its complexity, its histories its politics, and its sociologies.
Biography
Born in St Louis Missouri, impeded by ignorance, geography and circumstance, I lived the first unpropitious 18 years of my life in midwestern suburbia.
In my early community of influences, art was an esoteric profession that wasn’t part of the array of recommended directions to be pursued. Suburban life and my first college experience were demonstrably white bread, insular and, immaculately uninspiring. I would describe my initial college Art course experience at a monochrome Missouri college as the epitome of the awkwardness of parochial Ozarkian regionalism.
After leaving college prematurely, a trip to the west coast with two classmates helped blow out some provincial muck. Soon after that trip, I made another move to the Philadelphia area, and at last, inspired by a class with painter, Gus Sermas, I finally worked my way to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where opportunity brought me to another influential teacher, Tony Phillips. I subsequently collected a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Fine Art from SAIC.
Shortly after graduating, I was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant. That freed me to create a series of works which helped me to expand my understanding of the language of paint and then further helped me to win another award, a New York City studio space grant from the Marie Walsh Sharp Foundation. So, with my girlfriend, fashion designer, sculptor and educator, Herion Park, to whom I eventually married, I worked 5 years in New York.
Currently in Florida, I paint canvases and large scale murals for public and private spaces, grabbing thematic material from current events or the madness between my ears, and reconciling these with timeless archetypes and mythologies.
The first act: to perform the ritual of mixing and preparing the paint, because the love for the medium is what sustains my interest. Its magical, even after thousands of years of iterations.
The second: to make something intelligible in a ‘language’, in a perceptual, representational, narrative style, drawing on the sub-conscience to provide the relationships and meanings to the pairing of disparate characters, and spaces, and yet speaking to a timeless ethos.
My traditional technique and inclination for the beautiful, lets me flex socially acceptable muscles in a slight of hand that allows the deviant to slip in. I enjoy the deceitful act of painting visually recognizable forms into ludicrous theater. In its audacious tri-axial goals of entertaining, informing and perplexing us, in service of contemporary socio-geo-political criticism and excavation of the mind, I think my art is meaningful.
Life is frequently chaotic and wacky. But, it has a purpose. I’m not smart enough to know the purpose but, I enjoy observing its seemingly infinite variations on its rhythms. I love its complexity, its histories its politics, and its sociologies.
Biography
Born in St Louis Missouri, impeded by ignorance, geography and circumstance, I lived the first unpropitious 18 years of my life in midwestern suburbia.
In my early community of influences, art was an esoteric profession that wasn’t part of the array of recommended directions to be pursued. Suburban life and my first college experience were demonstrably white bread, insular and, immaculately uninspiring. I would describe my initial college Art course experience at a monochrome Missouri college as the epitome of the awkwardness of parochial Ozarkian regionalism.
After leaving college prematurely, a trip to the west coast with two classmates helped blow out some provincial muck. Soon after that trip, I made another move to the Philadelphia area, and at last, inspired by a class with painter, Gus Sermas, I finally worked my way to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where opportunity brought me to another influential teacher, Tony Phillips. I subsequently collected a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Fine Art from SAIC.
Shortly after graduating, I was awarded a Pollock-Krasner foundation Grant. That freed me to create a series of works which helped me to expand my understanding of the language of paint and then further helped me to win another award, a New York City studio space grant from the Marie Walsh Sharp Foundation. So, with my girlfriend, fashion designer, sculptor and educator, Herion Park, to whom I eventually married, I worked 5 years in New York.
Currently in Florida, I paint canvases and large scale murals for public and private spaces, grabbing thematic material from current events or the madness between my ears, and reconciling these with timeless archetypes and mythologies.