My large-scale landscapes and figurative work use natural and man-made forms to anchor the viewer in the real world while encouraging contemplation of the metaphysical. I like to take familiar scenes and give them a dreamlike, mythic quality.
I have my mother, a painter with a passion for estate auctions, to thank for this. Wherever we were living at the time—Ohio, New York, Virginia—she would scour the weekend auction ads and off we’d go. As a kid, I was transfixed by the local folk art for sale: the stoic portraits; the flat landscapes with their disconcerting perspectives. I saved my allowance to buy one of these strange paintings, but decided to paint one myself instead. I sold it, and this somehow convinced me that I could be an artist.
After earning a degree in art history from Swarthmore College I thought I would go on to study art restoration, but the need to pay off student loans intervened. I moved to Boston, embarked on a career in the tech industry, eventually transferred to the Bay Area, and painted intermittently. In the back of my mind, there was always a singular goal: to retire to a place where I could live on the ocean and paint full-time. And here we are.