ARTIST BIO

Having been born in 1954 I grew up with the images of modern art and was especially drawn to expressive abstraction. It was everywhere I looked, from magazines that came to our house to the covers of my brother’s jazz records. I even grew up just blocks away from an early abstract mural by a then not so well known artist Wayne Thiebaud that I frequently visited and studied in my youth. I absorbed an explosion of imagery and sounds from classical to modern jazz to psychedelic to pop and beyond, and I fed my mind on all I would see, and hear. My paintings and sculptures are a continuing inner search based on everything I’ve studied and observed over my now many years and everything I see everyday. I work in the moment so every painting is like an improvisation and I often rework my paintings over time, so many are often dated over several year spans. Until the work leaves me it isn’t finished. My sculptures often borrow from cultural art, folk artist, and the “outsiders”. They are much more primitive than my paintings. I absorb all I see and hear. I make what I feel inside.

I intertwine art history and musical references in my compositions with rhythms and marks referencing notations and movement. My artworks are my references and tributes to all the artists, artwork, and music I’ve studied, learned, and admired for so many years. I think of my works as relics because these are what I’ll leave behind when I’m gone.