From deep within a wooded forest, to gazing upon pastural landscapes, my work takes the familiar elements of natural settings and adds a darkened edge. The themes of aloneness, and the vastness of nature in my works, most likely result from growing up in rural, Rust Belt, America, in the 70's/80’s. Woods were cleared for factory farms, while small family farms were left abandoned. The bleakness of the winter gray against the backdrop of snowy open fields and black woods dotting the horizon. I am fascinated by the margins just outside normal, slightly beyond comfort, the merging points, the intersection of man and machine, analog and digital, future and past. Whether it be a futuristic landscape, with toxic air, or an ancient dark woods filled with lurking demons, the contrast of the calm, natural setting is tinged with the effects of decay and demise. A deliciously dark surprise awaits us around every corner, and sometimes the devil is just an ordinary man with greed in his heart and a black stain on his soul.

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Influenced equally by the German Expressionists, Italian Futurists, Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, my paintings have at once the feel of the early 20th century disruptors combined with modern abstraction and moments of dark rendering. Imagine a world where Ernst, Severini, Schiele, Bacon, and Freud, meet for tea in the wonderlands of Mark Ryden. I like to think of my influences gathered around a painter’s version of the Algonquin Round Table, while making pottery with Picasso. I prefer to use muted, earthy jewel tones, and contrasting schemes, in combination with a distressed surface, to achieve an aged quality to the feel of the paint. Perhaps I am creating a visual tonal palette to accompany the olfactory cues in my memory. The smell of my Grandfather’s woodshop, of cherry tobacco and turpentine, smoke and oil, the freshly cut grass mixed with the odor of gasoline, burning leaves in the Fall, the dusty leather harnesses for long dead horses hanging in Grandma’s attic, the scary Victorian antique mirrors I always expected to see a ghost standing behind me in. These are the playgrounds of childhood, of my imagination, and the memories that channel my work.

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My photography is a mix of street documentation, landscape and portrait. I approach photography as a painter. The horizon line, vanishing point and contrasts are all in mind as I frame the images I shoot. I am developing dark room techniques to further push and exploit images as works of fine art. I am interested in the interplay and exploitation of light and dark, a theme that carries out across all of my work. The photo surrealists Atget and Ray, as well as the pictorialists Steichen and Stieglitz form the basis for my curiosity around obscuring and revelation of narratives. I am currently working on a new large format series of prints for exhibition this December. 

 

I am also inspired by Picasso's little known work with photograms. This is a developing area for me I am currently exploring and experimenting in, playing with various materials and abstracting borders to create atmospheric results with the photogram form. I have also recently begun re-using my developing cast offs in a new form with oil pastels overlayed emphasizing lighting and creating new shapes within the frame.

 

I approach mixed-media collage as if I am presenting a Nordic Noir novel reimagined as art. With text curated and intermixed with newsworthy imagery, I like to interweave the pieces to tell a new tale. It is only through carving out words and patterns of language, that I start to get a visual story to tell. I like to work with gouache and India ink in collage, as well as charcoal. I am increasingly using acrylic paint overlayed with oil pastel, which is also leaching its way as a technique into my paintings.

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In addition to my works in photography and painting, I also bring a touch of the Mad Hatter to my whimsical ceramics. What would an alien raccoon’s espresso cup look like? What would Pan’s wall sconces feel like?  Which type of vessel would a nymph keep her hair pins in? Would the elves in the garden like a bathing bowl? These are the questions I attempt to answer in my hand sculpted and painted pieces. My method of choice is slab roll, as I like to achieve vertical volume quickly when sculpting. I start with an idea of where I want a piece to go, and then I organically let that shape come forth and tell me the direction. The pieces come to life if you give up control and let them be born how they want to be.

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With a growing body of work, in various media, the relationship between the pieces is bound tightly together through a cohesive interplay of light and dark, good and evil, dream and nightmare, the edge of real and surreal. On this plane, in this human existence in the modern city, we are in the proximity of the bifurcating realms of above and below. From the demons roaming our city seeking to practice indiscriminate violence, which we can pass by as the faceless stranger in the crowd, to the human angels that help us when we least expect it, we are existing in between the invisible borders of the two worlds. That junction is this life, and that is the margin of being I like to bring into my visual tales. I also like to find the unexpected humor in the absurd experience of our reality.

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