I fumbled around before I figured it out.

When I finally decided to go to school, I enrolled at a community college in Rochester. I moved in early, got bored, and walked to the campus until I found the art room. There was a catwalk above the studio where you could look down without disturbing the class. I stood up there and watched.

Eventually I asked the professor, Jim Prom, if I could use the other side of the studio to paint. I wasn't enrolled — I just wanted to paint somewhere. He asked the class, they said sure, and he offered me supplies. That summer I worked as Jim's assistant at art retreats, meeting national and international artists before I had officially started my education. Jim became my professor, then my advocate. Right before Christmas break he told me about MCAD. Both he and the pottery professor recommended me.

If I hadn't been bored in Rochester and walked into that building, I would have become a surgical technician.

Instead, the summer after my freshman year at MCAD, I was sitting at Peavey Plaza drawing — pen, highlighters, whiteout, materials that weren't supposed to go together. A stranger stopped, looked at the notebooks, and asked if I wanted to assist on a mural in Orchestra Hall, in the Donor Suites overlooking the very plaza where I was sitting.

That led me to Ed Lentsch. A year out of college I became Ed's apprentice — a role I held for several years. He introduced me to Doug Flanders, and soon I was driving to Art Chicago. My charcoal drawing ended up on a podium wall with a Jim Dine diptych on the other side. Someone saw it. Not long after, I received an invitation to the 181st Annual Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art at the National Academy Museum in New York.

I still don't know exactly how it happened. I never do.

I still have those notebooks from Peavey Plaza.

Full Artist Statement

My work is unified not by subject matter but by process and surface. The paintings are built through accumulation: layering, scraping, collaging, reworking. Material is added and removed until the surface holds its own history visibly, each decision leaving a trace beneath what came after.

The figurative works pull freely from religious iconography, political imagery, folk tradition, art history, and popular culture, treating each source with equal weight. Nothing is more significant than anything else — a medieval saint and a lucha libre wrestler occupy the same pictorial ground, subject to the same pressure. The abstract works are not a separate practice but the same conversation without figures: the atmosphere, the heat, the residue of everything that didn't need to be named.

My process is closer to following a misread image, something I mishear, or a color so strange it opens something I didn't know was there. There were times I would make a large deliberate move on a Friday and walk away — not knowing what I'd find when I returned. It was either a relief or a disaster — either way it arrived somewhere I couldn't have predicted, and that is what I'm after.

The titles function as a humorous misdirection, signaling that what the viewer brings to the work becomes part of the work itself — their reading is not only welcome but necessary. Both are equally true, even though they're not.