ARTIST STATEMENT

In high school I studied the basics of art with Oakland-based artist Charlie Milgrim and mostly followed the routine of the classroom assignments. Both of my parents are artists, graduates of the California College of the Arts and Crafts, so the notion of practicing art was familiar. Both of them studied under well-known Bay Area artists such as Robert Bechtle and Marvin Lipofsky.

After studying at UC Davis for a couple years, which included a summer in Siena and Rome, I became more focused on the idea of being an artist. I had the luck at Davis to study with artists Tom Bills, Mike Henderson, David Hollowell, Ari Marcopoulos, and Gina Werfel.  After Davis, I went to the University of Connecticut, first earning a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking. I spent my time between printmaking and painting, though mostly the former. I had the fortune to have several mentors, Deborah Dancy, Augustus Mazzocca, Olu Oguibe, and Laurie Sloan. I went into another graduate program, a Master of Arts in Italian literature, just months later, where I spent two years, under the tutelage of Norma Bouchard and Franco Masciandaro, closely studying the texts of Dante Alighieri, Ludovico Ariosto, Vincenzo Consolo, Umberto Eco, and Niccolò Machiavelli. 

Now in my studio practice, for the past couple of years, I have been primarily concerned with abstraction. I have been drawn to maps and grids and have been generally fascinated in the order of such man-made structures, especially when on the grander scale. Several times I have driven across the country and I have been captivated by the seemingly endless highways, where the lines can appear to drift into the horizon.

Ultimately I always find that the colors and forms present in my paintings are drawn from my immediate experience and environment.