Artist Biography:
I grew up as an only child in Vermont’s quiet countryside, believing that the seaports of China lay just beyond my neighbor’s trees, and that the lights I saw across the lake were from the Hollywood sign in California (in all actuality they were really, of course, from a correctional facility in New York). Equipped with that vivid imagination and a notebook, I began documenting my surroundings and events as I saw them to be, not necessarily as they were.
As the years have passed the story remains the same, although time, of course, leads to more psychologically, philosophically and emotionally complex surroundings and events. While studying and interning in Upstate New York, New York City and Europe I focused primarily on traditional and representational painting and drawing, honing my skills in figure studies and portraiture. Eventually, after many scratched out, torn up and extravagantly over-worked pieces, I was able to successfully combine traditional education with both my physical eyes and the eyes that only see internally; that is when the real magic began.
Obsessed with color psychology and passionately hell bent on the idea of making color produce sound, my paintings overlap blurred memory with physical realities, emotional impact and an ever-wandering mind. Titles for each painting come directly from the writing that took place during the time each was created, as both acts are inconceivably intertwined. These paintings are very real and direct, and they are also fantastically imaginative and vague; but most of all, for you and your eyes, they are whatever you want and feel them to be.
Artist Statement:
These paintings are about not accepting what is simply put in front of me; they are the juxtaposition of the conscious and subconscious, reality and desires, current time and memories or what was projected through dream. The paintings are about merging the visual with the emotional, the mental and the poetic; they are about making color produce sound and form evoke an emotional response. They recreate a moment through an understanding of what was, what is, what will be and what could be or could have possibly been. Simply put, each painting presents the blurred movement and rhythm of thought in the moments between conscious and unconscious-a snapshot to fully encompass human emotion at its highest.
