I was born and raised in a small town in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There were no street lights, each home a cookie cut from the stale dough of American idealism. Where individuality was often met with judgmental stares. Like many I learned about the outside world through the screen of a television. Tiny beams of electrons painting pixels across the screen, transporting me to worlds outside my small town. It was there where my sense of wonder and imagination began to take flight.
I would record my favorite shows on our family’s VHS player so I could play them back and pause my favorite scenes. I would copy the images on to any sheet of paper I could find. My drawings were often met with enthusiasm and excitement. I was fortunate enough to have a family that encouraged my budding artistic abilities and I was quickly enrolled in art classes outside of grade school. But it was always copying random images again and again. A human print machine.
Understanding emotions and how to properly communicate them was something that I was never taught growing up. I found that through art I could express my emotions that I wasn’t able to otherwise. It felt freeing to splatter paint across a canvas. Releasing raw emotions through the end of a pencil or paintbrush that I couldn’t vocalize or was told to suppress. My art was personal and I often struggled trying to explain it to others.
As I got older and began to grapple with my identity as a gay man, that struggle worked it’s way into my art very early on. From figure drawings and paintings, to collages stitched together. They began to take explicit turns that didn’t leave any room for questioning from my parents. But I didn’t care, my art were visual diary entries left open for their interpretation. I enjoyed the shock value my pieces were giving.
As the years went on and I explored many different techniques and I quickly found a love for printmaking. It was an easy way for me to replicate images but with less human error in a way that one can’t do otherwise. Combining this with my love for the abstract, my artwork was slowly beginning to reach its full potential. I could better express my stories, my thoughts, and my emotions through my pieces. Both present and from my past.
This site is a mix of my present work. Paintings, photographs, digital art, prints and more. An evocation of analog intersected with fine art ideas and processes. Pieces that I hope speak not just personally to me, but to you as well. The site much like myself and you will change with time and with that being said, I hope you’ll…