Growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, among the ghosts and mausoleums of industrial manufacturing, might have shaped me in a different way, had it not been for the influence of my mother, a talented painter who worked in oils. Endlessly inventive, unafraid of color, she instilled in me early on an appreciation for beauty and the profoundly personal understanding that, in this world, one could literally paint one’s self free – an idea that appealed to me. It is my feeling that the great traditions live in all of us, and that alongside all of the ingenious novelties at our disposal, these traditions continue to inform art’s most imaginative and inspired experiments.
Many of my paintings have a Surrealist influence. Working mainly with acrylic, I explore the complexity of relationships and the feelings that accompany them – love, desire, longing, fear – subjects familiar to us all. Of course, all of these topics are the order of the day in film, literature and music, but for me the rules of the imagination, the way chance and surprise provide unexpected twists of meaning, are what gives a painting its authentic surge, its real presence and power. Studio in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque.
