Painting and Prints
“Harold and His Purple Crayon” is one of my favorite kid’s books; I have always related to him, in that I define my world and my place through my creativity; sometimes I bumble into scary places, I am often suspicious of my own creative inventions and intentions, sometimes it’s all a big scribble.
Art supplied a degree of control for me when I was a child. It was a paddle to steer my little canoe through the shifting currents of my uncertain life. When I was doing art people responded positively to it and it got ingrained into my personality. It gave me focus, lit up my mind and provided forward momentum.
I sometimes envy those artists who can say “I make art to feel close to nature.” Or “My work is about the tension between popular culture and privacy.” I don’t really know what my art is about.
I see certain emerging themes: apocalyptic science fiction ideation, a sense of something huge and possibly ominous waiting beneath or above the mundane horizon. But to say I set out to make those things would place the cart before the horse.
I was born in Berkeley California, grew up in Ithaca NY, earned a BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, moved to Los Angeles, earned an MFA in film directing at the American Film Institute and worked in the Los Angeles film industry variously as a set dresser, property person, painter, and director for 17 years. I wrote and directed a feature film, Dirty Habit, just before moving to New York in 2007, where I’ve worked as a truck driver, filmmaker, web designer and a handyman. Most of my spare time, apart from having kids and being a husband, has been dedicated to writing, web design, filmmaking and, most recently, 3d modeling in Blender.
I’ve done photography and photoshop consistently, as an adjunct to my web and film work. But in 2019 I felt a need for a more immediate creative outlet, unmitigated by technology, something physical, like dance, and I started doing very free, Jackson Pollock-like paintings. I haven’t painted on canvas since undergraduate art school, and it was like coming home. Some of the imagery that comes out of my painting and photoshop process overlaps my writing and web design at spacerex.com. Some of it is pure abstraction. I hope you find it interesting.