Bio

Born in New York in 1983 I grew up with a great variety of contemporary artistic influences. My father owned a silkscreen business that brought me in contact with the works of artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf and Julian Schnabel. At a young age I was taken to extensive retrospective museum exhibitions, gallery openings, and artist studios. 

The greatest creative influence in my life has been the time I spent at my fathers studio surveying all the artwork produced, learning the printing process, and meeting artists as they would come and go. At fourteen I started working full time racking prints during the summer. At fifteen I went to work as a studio assistant for an artist named Peter Halley, I returned to work in his studio the following summer and again two summers later. Halley’s studio influenced me creatively and also gave me experience with business aspects of art. The studio was large, consisting of several other artist assistants and also housed the operation of Index, an art lifestyle magazine. In this way I learned a lot from the studio environment and from all the individuals I worked with. My use of color, as well as other visual and conceptual elements, have been incredibly influenced by what I saw in Halley’s work.

My work has evolved from a visual journal that I began when I was twelve to document the experiences in life that inevitably fade from memory. It was not important to me what I drew, simply that I was drawing would create a mark for the moment in which it was done. I work with pen so that there is no erasing of any mark; the ink becomes a permanent part of the book. I work chronologically through the book so there is some reference of time, but I also go back through the book and add to every drawing so that every drawing reflects a complex layering of experiences that become one cohesive image. This imitates the process by which human develop unique and complex identities. The collection of journal pages I have now covers nine years and travels throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Spain, Italy, Egypt, London Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Bratislava.