About: Initially, I used brushes and palette knives but eventually began using my fingers increasingly to maneuver the pigments throughout the canvas. My fingers are an extension of my mind, knowing exactly where to go, how much pressure to use, when to stop blending, while brushes just felt unnatural, not to mention the thousands I’ve ruined by setting them aside in my messy space and letting them dry out.

When I begin a new piece, I usually finish the work within 1 or 2 days, or I’ll most likely lose interest, and set it aside for eternity because each is a reflection of how I’m feeling in that moment. I find it almost impossible to recreate that energy days or weeks later and why I dislike attempting to reproductions of work I’ve already painted. I rarely begin with a vision in mind, other than the color scheme and even those can change as the scene comes to life.

I’m not sure how to label my work as any one category because I’m self-taught and it’s never the same. Sometimes my work is more abstract, or more realistic, other times it has a bit of impressionism or surrealism I suppose? I’ll leave it to the experts to determine those details.

At an incredibly early age, I can remember feeling vastly different from the other children in school. My imagination had no limits, and I would spend hours alone in my room drawing, painting, and coloring. Movies like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and the Wizard of Oz, Atari video games, and Bob Ross mesmerized me. My first-grade teacher was amazed that I was drawing three dimensional houses, suns centered and not cut off in the left top corner, horizons were in the distance instead of a strip of sky and grass. I can attribute these and so many other influences as impacts on the colorful landscapes and abstracts I invent when I paint.

At some point I lost interest in painting which wasn’t reignited until years later when I randomly walked into a small art museum in San Francisco and saw the most amazing paintings, full of rich colorful pigments and texture. As soon as I returned to Delaware, I started playing around with heavy gels, modeling paste, and other mediums to create a 3-D like texture and I felt I finally found my niche in the art world.

Since then, hundreds of my pieces have found homes locally, across the country, and internationally, I’ve gained an ever-growing family of local and distant artists, and won the Art Battle Philadelphia, which was the first and only art competition I’ve ever had the nerve to compete in.