"is" Painting

I paint abstract portraits of people as empty shells through the lens of family disconnection and social disfunction. This documentation process captures my healing process as I develop deeper and more meaningful relationships with the people around me as I have grown older.

My father was a malignant narcissistic it profoundly affected every aspect of my dysfunctional upbringing. I had little or no connection with my parents or sister. I have always seen people from the outside and never fitting in, whether it was family, school or strangers. I have slowly fashioned a stable social world around me and painting has assisted in this therapeutic process.

The one connection that I had a young child was my grandfather. he was a golf shoe maker from Brockton, Massachusetts. I admired his ability to create with his hands and his blue collar work ethic. I would spend holidays with him in his workshop and admiring his massive tool collection and basic construction materials that he worked with. This led me to also work in more construction-based materials, following in his footsteps. I work mainly in latex house paint, acrylic and spray paint and I create most of his structural and decorative framing from scratch. Some of the substrates used are cotton painter drop cloths, fiberboard, cardboard, as well as old unwanted paintings. Applying years of professional graphic design principles with my grandfather's common materials, inspires my artistic direction.

Further inspiration from my grandfather's improvisation, I often using scraps of leftover framing wood or plastic scrapers created from household items like leftover butter or yogurt containers to apply the paint. The combination of sharp linear edges and random marks appeal to me.

I started painting in the early 2000s in West Palm Beach, Florida. After moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, I joined the Sandia Heights Studio Art Tour in 2015 and began to show and sell my works to the public. Over the next nine years, I sold more than eighty paintings. I became immersed in studying abstraction and refining my style over the next decade.

As of 2024, my wife and I currently reside in Lagos, Portugal.