My style hovers between primitive and cartoonish / grounded and whimsical / natural and supernatural.
I started drawing as a toddler, enjoyed art class as a kid, won a couple of art awards in middle school, and took all the art classes I could get my hands on in high school — but I never had consistency, flow, style, or a regular practice until well into adulthood.
I didn’t go to college for art due to lack of family support, but I like to think that’s part of why my creativity remains intact… or maybe that’s just a story I tell myself to not be jealous of people who went to art school? My art-making usually sneaks into little spaces between the mundane or the painful, like dandelions through sidewalk cracks.
My drawing process is always improvised and fast-moving, with no particular plan, narrative, or outcome in mind. And yet these older works clearly feature recurring themes; a personal lexicon of shapes, faces, figures, gestures, and elements of nature.
I've come to retroactively view these channeled characters and beings in my work as something like sentinels of Creativity itself. I can see them as protective, poetic participants in my ongoing process of healing, recovery, and growth. The joy I receive from helping them into existence has certainly kept me going over the long haul.
I prefer the tactile experience, evocative associations, and freedom of drawing on cheap paper and other common surfaces not intended for for “fine art” — notebook pages, copy paper, envelopes, receipts, Post-Its, paystubs, walls, etc. Considering how much I loved to play “office” as a kid, this totally checks out.
Collage, rudimentary printmaking, photography, and sculpture also get mixed-up into my art processes. Once in a blue moon at special events, I’ve been known to create a totally improvised mural on giant paper.
In 2012, I was one of four artists to conceptualize, design, and complete this 128-ft. sound wave mural in Northampton, MA.
In more recent years, my near-daily journaling practice has been profoundly affected by the art, writing, and creativity teachings of cartoonist and author Lynda Barry. I’ve filled about 130 notebooks and counting since 1997.
Art Influences:
My earliest image-based stimuli (which I imagine must have shaped my little developing artist mind) were cartoons, stuffed animals, 1970s graphics and animation (ex: Pinball Number Count), Sesame Street + The Muppets, and storybook illustrations.
In the 1980s, I loved the popularized works of Picasso and Van Gogh, like everyone else did — but my visual attention was most fixated on things like MTV (rock and pop stars, music videos), fashion / hair / make-up, and regular television.
In the 1990s, it was grabbed by a variety of bold artists like JM Basquiat, Keith Haring, Diane Arbus, Frida Kahlo, Barbara Kruger, Jan Švankmajer. I also became enthralled by the visual language of alternative rock bands, album art, graffiti, and the multimedia lexicon of DIY art-punk and activist counterculture. Then I was moved by the art and politics of Bread and Puppet Theater, and the otherworldly imagery and process of artist Deborah Koff-Chapin.
During the 2000s-2010s, I got inspired by and resonated with the work of SWOON, Jesse Reno, Dominique Goblet, Gabriel Tamaya, and the aforementioned Lynda Barry.
In the 2020s, I became inspired-but-vexed by the odd, layered collages of two separate, unrelated guys I was already following on instagram: Author/Artist Austin Kleon, and noise musician Id M Theftable, neither of whom ever seem to talk about HOW they make their weird collages… so in my detective work to figure it out and try it for myself, I discovered a whole new creative outlet that I LOVE — hence my growing collection of new collages in my 5x7 sketchbook! A big pivot from the older work featured here in the archive.
Sculptural experiments
