ARTIST STATEMENT

My work emerges from a desire to translate the human experience into color, gesture, and layered form. Working on unprimed canvas rolled across the studio floor, I approach each painting as an open field—an encounter with the unknown. Oil, acrylic, and construction-driven tools become extensions of a physical, intuitive process in which textures accumulate, colors collide, and structures reveal themselves through action.

Raised in Connecticut and now rooted in Boulder, Colorado, I often move between multiple canvases at once, allowing each series to evolve as a distinct investigation into moments of intensity, joy, conflict, resilience, and spiritual searching. These paintings are built through velocity and pause—marks that speak to both vulnerability and strength, to the turbulence and grace that shape a life.

 My path to painting deepened in California. When I lived in Los Angeles working for Gensler Architects, I found myself drawn more and more to the studio—letting architecture, light, and the vast West Coast horizon pull me toward a life of creative expression. That pull only strengthened through my long connection to Santa Barbara, a place that has shaped my artistic voice for more than two decades. My grandparents retired in Montecito, my mother and stepfather later made Santa Barbara their home, and countless summers were spent driving up the coast or crossing states from Boulder to visit them. Those trips became my refuge: moments when family encouraged me to follow my heart, trust my spirit, and paint.

 Santa Barbara was one of the first places where I felt truly attuned to nature—where the early morning fog, the ocean air, and the rolling hills opened something inside me. The sense of mystery and serenity in those landscapes continues to echo through my work today. A large Santa Barbara sugar pine cone sits on my desk as a reminder of my family, the coastline, and the belief that beauty reveals itself when I let go. It grounds me, lifts me out of creative doubt, and brings me back to the freedom of painting.

 My trajectory shifted profoundly after September 11th, when my wife survived the collapse of the World Trade Center. That moment led me from finance to architecture, and ultimately to the studio, where the architectural impulse now lives in scale, structure, and risk-taking gesture. The monumental works, in particular, stand as declarations of creative freedom—immersive forms driven by a belief in the sublime power of color and the possibility of renewal.

 Guided by a lifelong engagement with mythology and the hero’s journey, I enter each canvas as an act of becoming. A single mark begins the search; the painting teaches me how to follow. Through the physicality of painting—once expressed through sports, now through layered fields of pigment—I seek not to illustrate a story but to reveal one in real time: a story of movement, perseverance, connection, and the quiet hope that beauty can rise from upheaval.