Artist Statement
I have taken my life long knowledge of visual communications and used it to explore ideas and concepts in various ways.
America tells its story in images as much as in words. The posters, the club cards, the travel lithographs, the wartime calls to action — these were the language through which a country told itself who it was, what it valued, and who it was for. My work lives in that tradition: original art built from the iconic events, people, and moments that define the American experience, made in the visual language that the 20th century perfected and that still has things left to say.
I fell in love with the 20th century because I lived through the latter half of it — which is to say I experienced it the way anyone absorbs the world most deeply, between the ages of twelve and twenty-two, when identity is forming and emotions run close to the surface and everything is being filed away for later. That era made me. The work is what I’ve been making of it ever since. I make original work that the era itself never got around to making — honest, historically correct, built in a visual language that still has stories left to tell. Some of the subject matter is overdue. History simply left people out, and this work is a correction. Some of it is pure affection for the era. All of it is new. You can’t find it anywhere else.
A career in advertising and design gave me a long education in visual communication — its history, its mechanics, its power. My influences run deep into the first half of the century: the cool precision of European Art Deco, vintage advertising, travel posters and propoganda art, the bold flat work of the WPA, social realism, pop art and the heat of the jazz club broadside. Every piece draws from that world. Every subject was chosen because the history still matters and the design still works. Some of it corrects a record that was wrong. Some of it just makes you smile. The century earned both.