Beats It Painting

Thank you for your interest in my art. Most recently, my work has been exhibited at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. My paintings have also been featured in individual and group shows in San Francisco, Palm Beach,Telluride CO, Durango CO and Pagosa Springs CO. My works are in private collections throughout the United States. I thrive on the challenge of conceptualizing, developing and executing an idea superbly in paint. I also like the challenge of distilling a concept to its simplest graphic form and expressing it with minimal detail. This is not as simple as it seems! Many of my paintings focus on what I call iconic imagery, objects or scenes that are universally recognizable whether it is Adidas shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses or a woman sitting at an idealized Southern California pool. I am intrigued by iconic images because they are immediately recognizable and invoke involuntary emotional impressions. Originally, iconic paintings were of holy people or religious objects of worship. Today's religious objects are created by advertising and the media and offer divinity on another level. Never satisfied adhering to one direction, I have embraced several paths beyond my iconic art. My painting also focuses on abstraction with geometrical elements in an attempt to explore visual symmetry. While abstracts, these paintings have a strict internal structure. Drawing upon the discipline of Japanese calligraphy and the bold contrast of monochromatic work is yet another path of my art. The fluidity and boldness of the brush coupled with the black and white contrast elicits movement and creates a sense of artist spontaneity. Moving from the tradition calligraphy I have evolved a stylized graffiti/tag approach. My art education has been reflective of the many places that I have lived and includes the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Kansas City Art Institute. I have studied with seminal painters such as Nathan Olivera and Frank Lobdell and was guided in my appreciation of art by Kirk Varnedoe (former MOMA chief curator). While I spent many years in the San Franciso Bay Area, I now call Southwestern Colorado my home.