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Born and raised in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was exposed to the arts as a child
and encouraged to pursue it as a vocation. As a teenager, I
studied at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon
as a pre-college student, then moved to Tennessee to study
with Byron Mckeeby, later with Beauvais Lyons and Pam
Longobardi, all exceptional artists and printmakers.
I moved on to Louisiana
State University for my graduate studies. My work is done
through the mediums of drawing, painting, prints and
non-silver photo processes, and to a more limited extent,
installation.
Every place I have lived
has left its mark on me and my work. I try to find something
universal in the subjective particulars of my own experiences.
In Pittsburgh, what concerned me were people and their
interactions with one another, and they continue to concern
me. My work from this time shows images of human futility,
heroics and gestures of compassion as I watched and lived
through, with family and friends, the economic upheavals of
the late 70’s and 80’s when the steel industry waned and
corporations downsized.
Concerns with human
interactions continued to be central to work I did in
Tennessee. But there, the mountains, not unlike those of
Pennsylvania, - rock outcroppings, ledges and hilly terrain,
provided a ground for the human drama which I thought gave the
drawings and prints a greater universality.
In Baton Rouge, with its
spooky if genteel history and everpresent, over bearing
industry, my work shifted in another direction, more interior.
Figures were still important but it also seemed important to
catalogue the bizarre, if mundane, world around me and within.
I wrote stories and sketches of people I met. I photographed
the hundreds of commonplace artifacts, both industrial and
personal which marked my life there and I used them in
non-silver prints and installations which featured little
drawing, few figures and employed spare geometries to arrange
the images …as though moving away from the figure would
somehow make the work less autographic and less personal. It
did not.
Since moving to Florida,
the figure has returned to my work along with local references
to the natural world….birds, fishes, water…although they
appear more symbolic or expressive than realistic, and their
rendering is often coarse …intentionally so. The themes which
have engaged me here are change and transformation, whether
violent or benign.
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