Bio
I was raised in Wenatchee, WA and received my BA in Fine Art from Walla Walla College in Winter 2006. I now live in Walla Walla with my wife, Heather, and our collection of cats, fish, literature, art, and music. After graduating, I directed my efforts toward developing a community for myself that was fluent in art and progressive in thought. I recently have been a founding member of a co-op gallery, ArtSpace1, and the Walla Walla Art Alliance. I also helped create the Art Committee of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation, of which I am the chair, to pursue opportunities for artists in the area that make Walla Walla a more invigorating and inviting environment. I have been showing my work in wineries, coffee shops, restaurants, and small galleries for several years now and want to move my work into spaces devoted strictly to art.

Statement
My work is my personal quest for enlightenment. I am obsessed with sensual phenomena, psychology of personal identity, tapping the collective unconscious, movement, and dreams. This has sent me researching various mythologies, Jungian archetypal imagery, religion, alchemy, and iconography: essentially driving at the root of mysticism, searching the world and myself for understanding instead of answers. Answers are often too certain and cannot be trusted to stay put. Therefore, I hunt for the ambiguous, yet true, gut feeling, raw intuition, and reaction to an image that can cause one's insides to stir.

My imagery largely involves a form of portraiture, because I believe the face is the most genuine source of identity. However, we live in a world of mass media and communication that exposes us to countless representations of faces everyday. There is a science to the expressions used for every advertisement for every product. And now, with the progression and popularity of personal cameras, it is almost impossible to escape associating a specific individual with a face. This led me to develop a form of portraying a face that eliminates much of what is needed to recognize a person. I blur and twist an individual's features until the remnants are only vaguely the original. The result invokes a sense of intimate familiarity and mystery. While many contemporary artists often put emphasis on socio-political agendas and current movements in pop-culture, I try not to create work that can be easily dated. I believe that a painting can be universally valuable if fashions and trends are avoided, concentrating more on internal desires and tribulations of the psyche.

I see myself as a constantly changing being, an artist, yes, but also a scientist, a mystic, and a visual activist. I have gone through many styles and mediums to arrive at my current aesthetic, but I feel the examples given in this portfolio are my most honest. However, my work will always change as I undergo personal evolution, as I build upon each experience. Mastery of any one skill would be useless if I did not hone a dozen others to use alongside.

"The Croquet Player (Self Portrait)" 2006
Materials: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions (HxW): 48"x24"

"Ach Isabella" 2007
Materials: Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas
Dimensions (HxW): 36"x32"