About

Short Bio

I attended Pratt Institute just out of high school, working with the master painters Gabriel Laderman, the sculptor Erlebacher, painters Ernie Briggs and James Gahagan. I took classes with Lennart Anderson at the Art Students League to make certain moving into pure abstract painting was not a mistake. But I was being pulled that way so strongly. I attended receptions at the premiere abstract expressionist gallery in NYC at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery when I was 18. After Pratt I lived all over the country, e.g., graduate school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan where I continued painting but also welding steel and casting in iron and bronze.

Statement

My paintings are informed by Impressionists and Abstract expressionists. Compositional concepts absorbed decades ago evolve within me to this day. I express my most passionate realities (the story beneath ordinary everyday life things), producing on canvas much of what people feel when they get religious. If I get lost on canvas, I stick my head up into the sky and feel magnitude. Paint always guides me through. I look for spatial relationships right away; color finds shape, creates volume between colors. Dialogue between ideas becomes a call and response. How I place shapes together becomes the structure: ‘(where’ they exist in space in relationship to each other). The picture plane in the paintings changes constantly through the volume that color creates, (in a constant state of relational movement). What one thinks is coming forward then shoots back when in relationship to something else coming forward. My painting process is unsettling, passionate, radical, and driven. A body of paintings is like movements of a symphony that take a year to realize. Each painting has immediacy to it, but takes time to complete; it’s my own personal paradox. The painting is the consequence of technique and skill brought about by the concept.