Tire Swing Painting

Art to me is what water is to fish. I am comfortable when I create. I could swim around for hours in my paintings if I ever had the chance. My father introduced oil painting to me when I was about 11 years old. I can always remember drawing and painting as a younger kid, but the oil painting is what really started it all for me. My first paintings were very basic two dimensional colors floating in space… all over space to be exact. Needless to say I have learned a lot about painting and composition in the last 20 + years. For me, the most influential time artistically was my high school years. It was a time period that I made giant leaps in understanding how to put my mind and emotion onto canvas. Weaning back of forth between extremely abstract and surrealistic work. I was able to find an extreme appreciation for art in my life. Towards the later years of my high school career, I took a few water color classes at MIAD. I find that working with different mediums can serious complement my work in ways that would not otherwise be discovered. Once I finished high school I continued on to Columbia College Chicago in attempt to obtain my BFA in painting. I participated in school at Columbia for about a year and a half before I decided to pursue other options. My time in Chicago built a great deal of character. However, I don’t believe I was old enough to understand what great opportunity I had, in the position I was in. Ever since I have been creating art on my own. Most of the shows I have entered into have been craft fairs and good opportunities to sell my work on a small scale. I find that my art has been claimed faster than I have been able to produce it, causing a relative lack in substantial inventory at any one given time. It was last year (2016) that I finally decided to shut down all the creating for people, and really started to solely create for myself. This great change has taken away time limits and once again caused evolution in my work. I can’t imagine what the future will look like, but I know for a fact it’s going to be colorful.