I am an Urban Landscape painter living in the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland.
I have enjoyed creating art since elementary school, my first formal classes were at The Cooper School of Art where I majored in Graphic Design and later moved on to attend The Cleveland Institute of Art.
While at the Institute of Art I worked part time as a sign painter, where I started working with gouache. The opaque quality and the crispness of line that this water based medium offers works well for rendering the river traffic, bridges, buildings and street life. I find the urban design elements that an industrial city offers interesting and rewarding to paint.
Where others see rust and aging infrastructure I see colorful shapes and patterns. This brought about my development of what I like to call fragmentation. That is the breaking up of the landscape into fragments of colors and shapes.
When painting with oil or gouache I work on a black background which makes the colors more vibrant. My color palette and technique has been influenced by colors of the Fauves and shapes of German Expressionism.
I served on the board of the Cleveland Artists Foundation for six years, and am the
co-founder of the Pretentious Cleveland Portrait Artists, a group that has been drawing live portrait models for the past fifthteen years.