"KEEP YOUR SWORD HAND FREE" Painting

I was raised in a small town on the California Mexico border. My parents were both artists, father-architect, mother-painter/ceramicist. Several kinds of art activities were always on the schedule whether it was visiting craftspeople in Mexicali, silkscreening Christmas cards that I would design, watching my mother paint - and always drawing. One year we painted 20 larger than life versions of Lautrec’s Parisian night life scenes for a “church” gala. My father was not only an architect but he made things-that’s where I learned how to make things-and now I make things too. I was educated locally and at CU Boulder, CalARTS and Cooper Union.Some of the teachers that had the biggest influence with me: Jerry Kunkel, Jack Whitten, Paul Brach, Miriam Schapiro, Lynda Benglis and Jim Starrett. My work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Kansas City, Hawaii and is in both corporate and private collections around the country. In 2017 I partnered with another artist to produce twenty large scale images for a Metro station in Santa Monica California. Now my practice consists of sculpture (with a bend toward the utilitarian,) architectural rendering, life and plein air drawing and watercolor (of which I’ve published several books) and complex formal abstraction that encompass’ my interest in natural phenomena, psychedelic experience, western and eastern systems of geometry and philosophy. I love ambiguities – in shape, pigment, texture, as well as a more contemplative aspect of focus and intensity.