Artist Bio:

I began my 30+ years of artistic pursuits developing logos, carving and hand painting signs in my hometown of South Lake Tahoe, California. I settled in Erie Pennsylvania in 1990, and have been a working professional in nearly every aspect of the commercial arts; from ad agencies to silk screening, custom graphics/signage to muralist ever since. I received my BA in Art Education from Mercyhurst University in 2003, and earned my MFA in painting from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2008. I have worked and exhibited artwork in a variety of media from Pennsylvania to Ohio, New York, Seattle, California, Nevada, Oregon and now here in Arizona, and have received awards in sculpture, painting, and public art projects. Since graduating with my MFA, I have been teaching a wide variety of art classes across 5 different Colleges/Universities, including two here in my new home, Arizona.

I spent almost 12 years at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, teaching painting, drawing, visual studies, and art appreciation, and served as the Technical Director for the collage’s Studio Theatre– building sets and creating unique environments. I also had an enjoyable run of about 9 years teaching several different classes at the Erie Art Museum and in my studio.

I'm very excited to be living and traveling around the West and painting out in these incredible landscapes. My images have always wandered between very abstract to more representational. That situation has continued, although I have found it strangely difficult to not fall in love with the stunning western landscapes and simply paint them as they appear. You may notice some of those struggles as you look at these images– and I am perfectly fine with that. I hope there is something for everybody here.

Artist Statement:

I am in a perpetual state of awe and wonder in the landscape. As a visual artist and teacher, I am driven by Design– color, form and composition. I look for these in the natural world, and desire to present these in new, different and unique ways. Through color and texture, I emphasize the often overlooked aspects of the our environment and its compositional structures, while downplaying or minimizing the obvious. The result is to force new ways of seeing… prompting surprising revelations about our world and ourselves.

My work has always been about attitudes, choices and the act of “seeing” versus merely “looking.” It’s about the nature of reality and what we claim to know about it. I’m generally not interested in providing you familiar images of things you’ve seen in the ways you’ve always see them. I want to change the way you look at things. I want you to see things differently… what if we were willing to actually do that?