I was born in 1970 in Los Angeles.   I lived there until age eleven, when my Mother and I moved to Siskiyou County, CA, the birthplace to as many as four generations of my family.   Even before this move I was drawing and taking art classes.   At the age of sixteen I returned to Los Angeles for a month to study at Otis Parsons School of Design.

My interest in art eventually led me, when I was eighteen, to the University of California, Santa Cruz.   There, I focused on painting, studying most notably with Patrick Aherne, Don Weygandt, and Chinese Master Calligrapher Wong Dong Ling.   I dedicated myself to learning about paint through a process of intuitive exploration.   This led to open-ended abstract imagery teetering between metaphor and confusion.   UC Santa Cruz also happened to be where I met my future wife, Elizabeth Huber.   When I graduated in 1992, I opted to stay another year at UCSC to fulfill a post-bac "Fifth Year Degree."  

The next two years I spent north of Santa Cruz in San Francisco.   I played music in a band called Leaf Yard, worked in a coffee shop, and my painting generally avoided any challenging issues in art.  

Being tired of always having to use a broom at work, I applied to graduate school.   I attended Boston University from 1995 to 1997.   There I studied with John Walker, John Moore and Alfred Leslie.   My primary inspiration came from the other artists in the program enrolled with me.   Among the many were, Michael Holden (Who I was friends with already at UCSC), Bryce Vinokurov (another friend from UCSC), Jeff Roper, Mary Matson, Chris Mir, David Harrison and Gina Borg.   While in Boston, I also undertook a different sort of art education as a Security Guard at Harvard's Art Museums.  

Not at all in love with Boston and missing Elizabeth who stayed in San Francisco, I moved back upon completion of my MFA.   For two years I worked remodeling Victorian houses.   I kept a studio in the Inner Sunset District and lived in Cole Valley.   I began making large semi-figurative paintings of Towers.   The Tower paintings were a response to the beautiful bridges around San Francisco Bay and Sutro Tower that crowns Twin Peaks in the center of the San Francisco Peninsula.   I wanted these paintings to fulfill what I felt were the essential needs of painting, (light, air, structure, presence, etc.).   This series of forty or more paintings sustained me for three years.   Before finishing though, I took a position at Santa Rosa Junior College as Adjunct Professor, teaching Painting, Drawing, and Watercolor.   I stayed at SRJC for four years until I moved to Los Angeles in August of 2003.   In 2001, I added a concurrent Adjunct position at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA.   There I taught Painting, Drawing, Advanced Design and a Techniques and Materials class.   In 2002, I curated an Exhibition of Drawings by forty of my fellow art instructors at SRJC.   This focus on drawing caused me to evolve my art practice.   I began making complicated brush and ink drawings on paper.   The images ranged in size from very small to twelve by twenty feet.   My drive was to see how much inventive structure and pattern I could squeeze out of my brain.

When Elizabeth and I moved to Los Angeles, I took a studio downtown in an old bank building amid massive urban redevelopment.   My artwork, when I got here and began to make art full-time, continued to grow out of the patterning process I began in San Francisco.   It morphed briefly into some three-dimensional pieces and quickly burned itself out.   Feeling a bit like I had taken an idea for too long a ride, I began looking for a new idea to explore.   I started making collages of digital imagery culled from the Internet.   These digital collages seemed constructed on the principals of painting, so I decided I should make paintings of them.   It had been a long time since I had used oil paint, and I felt that I was perhaps wasting a talent I spent my life developing.   Most of 2005 I have spent making six paintings from these collages.   Although I am very satisfied with these images I've left pursuing them, maybe because I do not want to burnout again.  

Now, I'm changing directions again.   I am making work less based on visual principles and more on pre-imagined objects that embody my present mental and emotional state.   I have a desire to create autonomous works right now, and I think it best to not repress this feeling so as to continue with one series of images or another.   Hopefully this new pursuit will keep the work fresh and my time in the studio inspired.