ABOUT

I grew up in the Mojave Desert, a town called Hesperia off the 15 Freeway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. I feel the desert in my body because I had such a visceral connection with it during those formative years.

I bring that bodily and spatial awareness to my landscape based artworks. I left the desert for Los Angeles to attend college in the late nineties, where I studied painting. I struggled with feeling claustrophobia in the city, without vast expanses and distant mountain ranges to orient myself. It became my habit to do one-day desert excursions, camera in hand, to explore and bring back imagery to the studio for painting. Over the years I began to experiment with photo collage as visual/spatial cartography, and I realized it was becoming another art form for me. That led to the Mapping Perspective body of work starting in 2007, and subsequently led to my first sculpture in 2010: Rebuilt Homestead.

For me, painting is a discipline which requires a meditative like state of peace, security, and focus. It is much easier for me to pick up a tool and do physical labor: cutting wood, building, problem solving in three dimensions. I am most productive when I can switch gears often, so I try to keep a rotation of projects going simultaneously, allowing me to explore nature, document and collage through photography, sit and paint, and build things.

My work flows from my explorations into the quest for identity and meaning. I am interested in how environment, landscape, religious beliefs, and political systems both create and disrupt communities. I became a father in 2001, one month after 9-11. Growing alongside three daughters is the most influential aspect of who I am.