Strontium Dog Artwork

Making art has always been a compulsion, one in which I have found some facility. I knew that an 'artist' was who I was probably as early as age 4 or 5, though I didn't head back to school to complete my art degree until 2001. I prefer abstraction, though I draw inspiration primarily from atmospheric phenomena, oblique light, and empty landscapes. I take pleasure in the tension created between where I hope a painting will go and where it leads me. Systematic methods and rules form the backbone of my pieces. Materials go down mostly in a certain order, I keep my toolkit of media and my palette deliberately small. I like how these constraints force the dialog between the marks and my intent to remain focused. Though my intent is deliberate, the elements of composition that result always suggest new directions I may follow, retreat from, and revisit. But pure composition needs an emotional component. As I work I’m exploring what it means to suffer in life, to have a broken childhood, to struggle with addiction and self-doubt. Like many artists, I make music foundational to my practice. The rhythms and moods influence the marks I make as much as a thunderstorm or cirrus cloud. You’ll often find a song title or snippet of a lyric suffices as the name of one of my pieces.