Landscape images are important to me in the way that seeing the representation of a place outside my body stirs my feelings on the inside. In the past few years I have assigned value to these images based on the emotions felt rather than to articulating any certain place. I pour over the photographs I’ve collected from where I’ve lived, I go through my old plein air work; or observational on-site paintings, and I conjure the images of places that have mattered to me. These memories of things like where I grew up or where something life-changing happened to me are the most important, I draw on them to convey a meaning and a mood. 

My intent is for the color and tone to carry the emotional message of an image, I have worked on refining the shapes of nature, quieting and subtracting from them, to create an atmosphere of meditation and simplicity. This is where the meeting point of my personal connection to the painting can mingle and exist with a more universal emotive conveyance to the viewer. If I have ever experienced love, joy, loss, connection or disconnection, they have always occurred in this place, but they are not necessarily of it.  The paintings are there to occupy the space in between.

I was born in Cleveland in 1980, both sides of my family were fairly large and my verbal abilities were not the best, so I turned to making drawings of the things I thought were worth it— fighter jets and super heroes mostly.  That incessant drawing habit led me to pick up painting only after I left for art school to pursue an Illustration degree. There I discovered that I wanted to paint above all else. I turned to a Fine Arts degree and left to study abroad in Florence, Italy in 2003.  After being directly exposed to the Old Masters as well as some new ones, I felt a strong connection to the tradition of oil painting. This was paired with my interest in traditional Chinese philosophy and is the basis of how I make and view paintings today. I continue to live with my own fairly large family in Columbus, OH.