I was born in Chicago into a family of artists. My grandfather was a painter and an art historian at the University of Chicago; my father, a musician and artist in New Orleans and my mother, a poet. Following in their footsteps, I graduated in 2001 with a degree in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. 

I’ve shown in many galleries over the years … Bucheon, Figure 5, Incline, AMuse Gallery, and Dolby Chadwick, to name a few. Over the past ten years, I took a partial hiatus from art to pursue playing music, with bands such as Slim Jenkins, Royal Jelly Jive, local jazz bands such as the Cosmo Alleycats, to name a few.  When the pandemic hit, I realized that I had been yearning to dedicate myself to painting once again, so I quit all my bands and got busy in the studio. My latest solo show was at Vibe Gallery in Petaluma. 

When I first began painting, I would go to the museum every day and stand in front of my favorite paintings, imagining how they were made, moving them backward and forward through their production, removing paint in my mind, and placing it down again. I considered these paintings my teachers. 

My love of landscape started as a way to open up the claustrophobic walls of my tiny studio in the Tenderloin, which had only one small window. Each painting I made served as another window that opened into its own world. I loved the paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder, and I think it showed.

Painting has always felt like a refuge, but recently it has been a place to revisit darkness, a kind of comfortable darkness. I’ve always eschewed attempting any kind of political art, but I think the events of the world today can’t help but color my recent work. I’ve embraced it, and I find it somehow liberating.