My style of mixed-media drawing/painting hovers between primitive and cartoonish, grounded and whimsical, natural and fantastical.
I started drawing as a toddler. I did a crayon scribble mural on my bedroom wall one morning, and then signed it three times on the kitchen wall. I got in trouble for it, and that would
I enjoyed art class as a kid, won a couple of art awards in middle school, and took all the art classes I had access to in high school and college — but I never had consistency, flow, style, or a regular practice until well into adulthood. I didn’t go to college for art due to lack of family support, but I like to think that’s part of why my authentic creativity remains intact? I assume that art school could perhaps help me think about, contextualize, and write/talk about my work in non-habitual ways, which seems useful.
I have Complex Trauma from childhood and adolescent abuse which caused emotional damage, repression/stuckness, and arrested development. Recovering and developing my creativity as an adult has been instrumental in recovering and developing my self-esteem and sense of interconnection with the larger whole of life. I consider my artistic thriving to be a practice in both noncompliance and surrender.
My process is always improvised and generally fast-moving — with no particular plan, narrative, or outcome in mind. I finish most of my work in one sitting.
And yet these older works clearly feature recurring themes; a personal lexicon of faces, figures, symbols, shapes, and elements of nature.
I've come to retroactively view these channeled characters and beings in my work as something like sentinels of Creativity itself. I can see them as protective, poetic participants in my ongoing process of healing, recovery, and growth. The joy I receive from helping them into existence has certainly kept me going over the long haul.
I prefer the tactile experience, evocative associations, and freedom of drawing on cheap paper and other common surfaces not intended for for “fine art” — notebook pages, copy paper, envelopes, receipts, Post-Its, paystubs, walls, etc. Considering how much I loved to play “office” as a kid, this totally checks out.
Collage, rudimentary printmaking, photography, and sculpture also get mixed-up into my art processes. Once in a blue moon at special events, I’ve been known to create an improvised mural on giant paper with an audience watching.
In 2012, I was one of four artists to conceptualize, design, and complete this 128-ft. sound wave mural in Northampton, MA.
In more recent years, my near-daily journaling practice has been profoundly affected by the art, writing, and creativity teachings of cartoonist and author Lynda Barry. I’ve filled about 160+ notebooks and counting since 1997!
Influences:
My earliest image-based stimuli (which I imagine must have shaped my little developing artist mind) were cartoons, stuffed animals, 1970s graphics and animations (like Pinball Number Count), Jim Henson puppets on Sesame Street and The Muppets, mid-century storybook illustrations, and the puppets & props in Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
As a kid in the 1980s, I loved the popularized works of Picasso and Van Gogh, like everyone else did — but my visual attention was most fixated on things like MTV (music videos) and fashion/hair/make-up.
In the 1990s, it was grabbed by a variety of bold and edgy artists like JM Basquiat, Keith Haring, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Barbara Kruger, Jan Švankmajer, and the riot grrl subculture started by Kathleen Hanna (read or watch The Punk Singer). I was enthralled by the visual language of indie/ alternative rock band album art and videos, graffiti, geurrilla art, and the general lexicon of DIY art-punk and activist counterculture.
I was directly influenced by the art and politics of Bread and Puppet Theater, and the otherworldly imagery and Touch Drawing process of artist Deborah Koff-Chapin.
During the 2000s-2010s, I was inspired by the work of street artist SWOON, Sabrina Ward Harrison, Jesse Reno, Dominique Goblet, Gabriel Tamaya, and the aforementioned Lynda Barry.
In the 2020s, it was the occasional collages of two separate, unrelated artists I was following on instagram: Author/Artist/Creativity Teacher Austin Kleon, and experimental noise artist Id M Theftable.
Wanting to understand their collage works led me to discover a technique involving packing tape, thereby catalyzing my pivot into abstract collages that became a whole new body of work.
Sculptural experiments
