ABOUT ME
I was born in 1974 in Kingston, NY, and my path to becoming a painter was anything but direct. After a short and not-so-successful stint at Parsons School of Design in the early ’90s, I drifted away from art for nearly two decades. That changed in 2012, when I met Amarillo artist and gallery owner Ann Crouch.
At the time, I was working in advertising for Southwest Art Magazine and Ann was one of my clients. On each visit she asked if I was an artist; each time I firmly said no. One day she invited me to keep her company in the studio. She had set out an easel, a blank canvas, and a few colors of paint. That simple gesture—pushing paint around with a palette knife—became a ritual every time I visited her for years to come.
When Ann passed away unexpectedly in 2017, I felt compelled to continue. To honor her encouragement, I began keeping a sketchbook, snapping photos of architectural details, patterns in nature, and unexpected color pairings. Around that same time, I discovered the work and writings of Agnes Martin. I discovered that Agnes and I share a surprising number of parallels: two attempts at making it in New York City; difficult mental breaks that landed us in the same Manhattan hospital; the decision to escape to New Mexico; studying at the University of New Mexico; and, of course, an enduring devotion to the square and to lines.
Exploring grids on vellum and graph paper soon led me to acrylic on canvas, where I found a rhythm in hard-edge geometric painting. Along the way, artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Bridget Riley, Josef Albers, and Frank Stella became my teachers—guides whose work continues to shape my own. Drawing on their influence, and inspired by the forms of architecture I encounter every day, I developed a style that balances process with precision, intuition with order.
Today, I continue to refine this visual language—parsing architecture, landscapes, and everyday structures into lines, planes, and saturated fields of color. For me, painting is a way of noticing and translating the world around us. Agnes Martin once wrote: “You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.” That thought has stayed with me, guiding me back into the studio, again and again.
