I have always made art from the time I discovered the joy of creation using a hair pin to scratch a stick figure in a lamp table at age 5. It wasn’t well received but I was undeterred and eventually made it into a city-wide children’s art show held at the Lever House in Manhattan. I was hooked. As I grew older, I studied art at the Rockland Center for the Arts in Rockland County, New York, home to a number of artist’s colonies. I eventually attended college and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History, where I fell in love especially with classical Renaissance Art.
I often take my inspiration from iconic symbols, poems, sayings and pop culture from Western classical or contemporary usage and value them as a starting point to create highly colorful representational but not necessarily realistic images and narrative works. This could be anything from doing a homage to Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ painting with all the figures replaced with flamenco dancers to Elvis Presley as King David pursuing Bathsheba or illustrations of well-known phrases from Leonard Cohen or Shakespeare taught as computer code in a classroom modeled after Raphael’s School of Athens. I love to use these as a basis to create a narrative flow that continually advances in my mind as I’m working on a painting or assemblage. Receiving this stream of ideas and unforeseen associations is one of the most enjoyable experiences for me making art and I hope the viewer may have a similar experience while interpreting the work as they wish. Although my paintings sometimes have a whimsical quality, they are very much an expression of my thoughts and feelings about the universal concerns of life, death, love and loss.
Using charcoal I begin with a drawing on the canvas that I plan to use for the final painting. I continue with this initial sketch and then begin to paint over it and modify as needed. I find that keeps the idea flow fresh as I develop the finished work. Color is my equally great love and I can practically be moved to tears when I first see all my delicious oil or acrylic colors sitting on my palette at the start of a new painting session. For me the color selections I make are the unique expression of my own vision and sensibility and I strive to create a memorable visual impact on the viewer using the beauty of color and thought-provoking content as well.