I grew up during the era of space age optimism and Carter's  "Crisis of Confidence."  It was in a version of suburbia, typical of the Northeast of the 1970's where I stumbled upon a kind of aesthetic sensibility.  Protestant belief in "The Word" and distrust of "the image" was everywhere. Art was not valued. Art was not taught.  It was simply something extra.  Yet, if anything, the world seemed to be growing more visual all the time.

​

The overwhelming focus of my work seems to have been my own self consciousness about wanting to have created it.  Why choose to be an artist? Why did I bother to notice?

​

That moment when a seemingly chaotic collection of marks morphs into a mimesis of visual reality has always seemed a powerful act of transformation for me.  Leaving aside why we might choose to create images in the first place - what leads us to choose, to edit down the world to simply this or that image? And what have we chosen to build the image out of? A swipe of color, a thatch of cross hatching, a marbled brush stroke of thick paint… why these? There are lots of interesting answers when one chooses one set of visual building blocks over another; but, in my self-consciousness, I chose instead to not choose. I thought I would strip everything away in favor of a simple binary: the single "dumb" mark of the black dot on white.   

​

But, the person who gets the tattoo of a simple, tiny square - rather than getting the one of more intricate design - still has a tattoo; and so my drawings still manage to convey my other choices anyway: my interest in persons grappling with, and sometimes overwhelmed by, the syntax of their complicated visual environments.

​

I am self taught.  This is what I could come up with.