I received my BFA Tyler School of Art after attending the first session of the Pennsylvania Governor’s School of the Arts. Since that time I have worked on my own and with other organizations in various artistic endeavors. In my early years I worked as a muralist for many private and governmental clients, many of the murals measuring 15 x 60 feet. The murals covered a wide range of subject material; some of them are whimsical, a few are silly, others are serious. In 1985 I was the colorist at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, working with well-known artists, such as Red Grooms, on specially designed fabrics.
In 1984 I began assisting internationally known architect Robert Venturi, airbrushing special furniture prototypes for Knoll International. This lead to painting wall graphics in many Venturi designed buildings, including The Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery of Art in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Nikko Kifuri Resort Hotel in Japan, the Houston Children’s Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For the past 15 years I have also worked on drawings for upcoming projects, such as the design of the unbuilt Philadelphia Orchestra Hall, the new State House in Toulouse, France and several projects for Disney. The most recent projects include large murals for the New Jersey State Aquarium and a muralized send up of an “A” Frame house on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
My work has always had an architectural element to it, even before I began work Robert Venturi twenty-five years ago. I have been exploring the abstraction of the landscape I observe around me; evident primarily in the collage/etchings (Chine Colle) I have been doing since taking up printmaking in 1987. In this series of chine colles, the collage has gone far beyond the norm in typical printmaking. The collage compositions become the dominant element in these pieces. The etched images are starting points, with each piece having a distinct character, a different quality of light. The introduction of found paper, (old photographs of the artist’s, various mass printed media, hand made paper, metal foils, etc.) gives the prints an added dimension of light, texture and motion. The compositions were on the edge of abstraction verses landscape, interior and exterior. With the bits of “realism” and “tactile” they have become more so.
The pieces convey the fractured layering of everyday existence; the glimpse out the window of a train or car, the snippet of a song on the passing car radio, a segment of video seen from the corner of one’s eye. The layering of inside and outside space influence the complexity and ambiguity of these prints, in my attempt to evoke the modern experience.
About the Pastels
Recently, I have been exploring the idea of the subconscious and working from memory. In my pastels, which I have been working on for the past three years, has been a departure from my usual approach to painting and printmaking.
Paying attention to my dreams, I began to notice a recurrent theme of images from early childhood. Having moved from the country to Levittown in the mid-sixties as a small child, I was amazed at the uniformity in the landscape before me. The houses were all the same and the trees were mere sticks. Approaching Levittown, which was surrounded by harvested fields back then, were undulating hills covered with similar houses, your choice of three colors alternating in uninterrupted pattern, as far as the eye could see. It may be that our early impressions are made more vivid by the simple fact we have had fewer of them. Our brains are uncrowded. I found myself dreaming about the landscape of those days, even though the dreams had nothing to do with my actual experiences there. My dream of swimming in interconnected pools has nothing to do with any event that actually occurred, but the location was a familiar one to me.
I don’t care to deconstruct any of the dreams, but I am interested in tapping the imagery. I am not concerned with historical accuracy, but in the emotions caused by living in such a place at an early age.
My work can be found in galleries in New York, Atlanta and Nashville. I am in the corporate collections of the Sun Oil Company, Johnson and Johnson, the Penn Mutual Insurance Co., Dow Chemical, Mobil Oil, and in private collections in Philadelphia, Denver, Milwaukee, Houston, Fort Worth and Washington, DC.
