A journey in layers.

What began in a dark room in a photo studio at age twelve and found a sense of expression and joy on a rainy afternoon in 2009 has grown into a passion over the last twenty years.

The dark room was our family's commercial photo studio and ad agency, producing people-film prints when everything was manual and "feel," with no digital intervention — image made by eye and hand. Learning about success and failure through how a print was received by the customer as a pre-teen was instructive: hugely satisfying when they were happy, crushing when they weren't.

The rainy afternoon: the kids were all home, and my wife came home with five blank canvases and a bunch of acrylic paints and brushes. We each took a canvas. While the kids reached for brushes and started to paint pictures, I gravitated to a putty knife and a sponge. I began dropping blobs from the tube horizontally onto the canvas and worked the paint to either blend or stand alone, leaving negative space. It felt right, and I knew I wanted to do it again — in different ways.

My work is a depiction of emotion, remembrance, reaction, fear, hope, and fun — through color, depth, texture, and lightplay — and an understanding that beneath what we see are many more layers unseen. What's beneath is both literal and theoretical. There are layers upon layers of paint, and sometimes it takes many before the painting tells me what it wants to be. Sometimes it's what pokes through and the happy accidents; sometimes it's the weight of color and depth. It's always about a feeling. Often a journey. These pieces evolve over years — a beginning, a conclusion, and a lot of discovery along the way.

Fear is Weight — constant adaptation, change, covering up and selective revealing, awaiting judgment. Weight is physical in size and scope, but it is also the hard line of black against which bright white (the theory) can't touch the messy reality of all the change.

Hope is Blanche, who lived in joy and found the good in things — especially Orange pineapple ice cream.

Fun is Rabbit. A story in a game in a piece that's chaos yet uniform, balanced and partially uncomfortable — but when you find the rabbit, that's fun.

Who is the viewer? Could be anyone. First it's me — I stay with these pieces over a lot of time to let them breathe, to grow, or to simplify. Then any viewer should make a connection, to a color or a texture, to negative space or size, to simplicity or chaos, to wherever they need to go depending on what's in front of them. Each piece tells a story that will be different for everyone.