“I invite you into the visual realm where the simplest forms are the hardest to fully experience. I ask you to really look.”

During my childhood my father had one of the biggest antique gun collections in the Unites States, I grew up with 1,100 guns in the house. This taught me about collecting, and importance of one item over another. I also learned how to tell if something is real or not and how to grade items, this allowed me a schematic to apply to painting which I started in my early twenties when I moved to Los Angeles, after dropping out of school. I first moved to Venice where I got a job waiting tables at a small restaurant, which happened to be where several successful artist had lunch, these included Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Jonathan Borofsky, Peter Alexander, and Billy Al Bengston.

I was also introduced at that time to critical French philosophical theory, by the authors Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucalt, Henri Bergson, and Derrida. I was very excited about what I was reading by the authors, and inspired a great desire to write. I knew there was little chance of success for me in writing critical theory as I was not in academics, so I turned to painting instead to express my ideas.

I had brought with me my Mother’s oil paints. She had died when I was 3, I still held on to them; so I just went to work, often painting ten to fourteen hours, allowing no mistakes or difficulties to stop me.