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Artist Bio

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I was born in Texas and raised in New York. My biological mother was an Irish nun, but I never knew her, and was adopted by a Jewish family. My adopted dad died when I was in fifth grade after a two year battle with Leukemia. My mother remarried the following year, divorced a few months after that... and long story short... I'd become a full-fledged juvenile delinquent by the age of thirteen; and a runaway by fifteen. 

 

After beginning the ninth grade THREE times due to truancy (I made it as far as Ohio and Florida on Amtraks and Greyhounds at age sixteen) I miraculously was able to finish three full years of high school in just over fifteen months by attending night classes and summer school while living at a Residential Treatment Facility. It's like a high school meets a halfway house. I graduated only six months late. Then spent 10 cathartic years singing (and screaming!) in bands down on The Bowery while working as a freelance designer; eventually earning a degree in Writing in my twenties.

 

After working as a Met Museum guard in my 30s I was inspired to eventually go back for my MFA in Drawing in my 40s at the New York Academy of Art. I work as an Art Director in the Cannabis Industry and moonlight as a Drawing instructor.

Lately the world feels awash in trash. Not only is it literally stacked on every block where I live in Manhattan but it's abundant in our partisan politics; in pop culture; and in recent Supreme Court decisions. We are drowning in garbage being delivered as soundbites, click bait, and talking points.

As we collectively wonder if we haven't reached some kind of tipping point... as a society, or a world, or as a planetary ecosystem... I'm trying to witness the entropy with an artist's eye, and stay in my lane. Keep my focus on technique and finding new ways to keep my drawings, and the act of drawing itself, feeling fresh.

 

Making something focused, and artistic, out of other people's discarded detritus also feels appropriate as metaphor for my own adoption; and follows in the footsteps of 20th Century trash aesthetes like Rauschenberg and Picasso. 

 

Educated at New York Academy of Art (MFA) and SUNY Purchase (BA).

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