About

There is something in the human animal that cannot help but make marks. The further back we look the more we find ourselves decorating every available surface with organic forms and geometric lines, and whatever drove those first mark makers seems to have found its way into me as well. For me it is less a choice than a compulsion — a need to take pigments, oils, charcoal, chalk, water, and whatever else will adhere to a surface and create, or go quietly mad.
My work tends toward the abstract, built through the layering of media to create something the viewer can keep discovering over time. I am reluctant to over-explain individual pieces because the subconscious moments in the making are as vital as the intentional ones, and to dissect every decision would be something close to performing surgery on myself while conscious. What I can say is that my influences run through the Impressionists, Fauvists, and Cubists of the 19th and 20th centuries, and forward into more contemporary figures like Larry Rivers and Julie Mehretu, each of whom has sharpened my understanding of how the fundamentals of art — color, line, texture, form — can be pushed into new territory.
Currently my practice moves between two directions that seem opposite but aren't. One pulls toward abstraction rooted in ideas of emergence — consciousness, space, time — while the other moves toward direct representation and narrative. I find that moving freely between these two modes, letting mood and circumstance decide, keeps the work honest. The goal eventually is a convergence where narrative rises naturally out of the abstract rather than being imposed on it.
I also turn increasingly to non-traditional media. 3D printed plastic has recently entered the work and I have begun to see it less as a technological novelty and more as a way to build surfaces that recall ancient friezes — Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian — which feels right given that the impulse behind all of it is more or less the same impulse that carved those things in the first place.
Beyond the formal concerns, the work is driven by an inward turn as well. My Buddhist practice and a deep and genuine fascination with the iconography of Christ and the Western religious tradition both find their way in, not as contradiction but as parallel inquiries into the same questions. I have also found in the creative process a place to work through the larger concerns of being alive — including coming to terms with my own identity as a gay man — and more than anything it has taught me, slowly and with considerable resistance, to trust my own instincts.

I am a child of the hills of West Virginia and from that comes a deep love of nature, a preference for the slower ways of life, and an innate urge to shoot trespassers. All joking aside, my upbringing is integral to my story — growing up in the hollows of southern WV, surrounded by trees and natural beauty contrasted by the black and grey of never-ending coal mining, left an indelible mark on my sensibilities and a hunger to make sense of that contradiction through color and form.
It was through art that I first found a way to express myself, having learned to draw in those very same hollows at the knee of my grandpa, who filled my head with tales of nearly working for Disney animation. Those stories planted something in me that never left, and I found myself compelled to pursue Fine Arts at Marshall University — becoming the first in my family to earn a college degree and the beginning of an artistic life I have been building ever since.