MY ART
My style hovers between primitive and cartoonish / grounded and whimsical / natural and supernatural.
I started drawing as a toddler (as we all do), enjoyed art class as a kid, won a couple of art awards in middle school, and took all the art classes I could get my hands on in high school — but I never had consistency, flow, or a regular practice of my own until well into adulthood. I didn’t go to college for art due to lack of family support for that path, but I like to think that’s part of why my my creativity remains intact… or maybe that’s just a story I tell myself to not be jealous of people who got to cultivate their art for months and years at a time, whereas my art-making has always had to find its way into little everyday life spaces like dandelions through cracks in the sidewalk.
My drawing process is improvised and exploratory, with no particular plan, narrative, or outcome in mind — yet the drawings clearly feature recurring themes and a personal vocabulary of faces, figures, gestures, and elements of nature.
I've come to retroactively view the growing collection of faces, figures, characters, and beings in my work as something like sentinels of Creativity itself. I see them as positive poetic participants in my ongoing process of healing and growth.
I prefer the tactile experience, evocative associations, and low-stakes freedom available to me through working on cheap paper and other surfaces not intended for for “art” — notebook pages, copy paper, envelopes, receipts, post-Its, paystubs, walls, rocks, etc.
Collage, rudimentary printmaking, photography, and sculpture sometimes get mixed-up into my art life. Once in a blue moon at special events, I’ll do a large-scale improvised performance drawing on giant paper, with fat acrylic paint markers.
In 2012, I was also one of four artists to conceptualize, design, and complete this 128-ft. sound wave mural in Northampton, MA.
Most recently, my creative practice (notebook filling) has been profoundly affected by the art, writing, and creativity teachings of cartoonist and author Lynda Barry. I’ve filled about 120 notebooks and counting since 1997.
Art Influences:
I've been drawing for my whole life, beginning with a classic crayon scribble-mural on my bedroom wall when I was a toddler. My earliest image-based stimuli which I now see as early art influences were cartoons, stuffed animals, 1970s graphics and animation (i.e. Pinball Number Count), Jim Henson puppets, and storybook illustrations. In the 1980s, I loved the popular works of Picasso and Van Gogh — but my visual attention was most occupied by pop culture, rock stars, music videos, and video games.
In the 1990s, it was grabbed by a variety of bold artists like JM Basquiat, Keith Haring, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Barbara Kruger, Jan Švankmajer. I was also generally enthralled by the visual language of rock bands, album art, graffiti, and the multimedia lexicon of DIY art-punk and activist subculture. Then I was fully blown away by the art and politics of Bread and Puppet Theater, and the work of artist Deborah Koff-Chapin. I resonated deeply with the spirit and imagery of both, and continue to see their influence in my work. Interestingly, both of them made bold paradigm-shifting changes to their work in 1974, which also happens to be the year I was born.
During the 2000s-2010s, I’ve been enthralled by SWOON, Jesse Reno, Dominique Goblet, and Gabriel Tamaya.
Sculptural experiments
