Hyena

Visual Art – Pittsburgh

I am a 45-year old painter of works influenced by the traveling sideshow. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania near the county fairgrounds. It was there that I developed my interest in the carnival and its sideshow attractions. This was an exciting visual world of barkers gesturing me toward the exhibits, performances and the strange tattooed people that manned the spectacles and the games of chance as I roamed through the midway. On the built-up surfaces of my current paintings, the world is reflected and projected in a confusing way and through several layers. This is what I feel my life truly seems to be, our day-to-day experiences are distorted and allow for distracting threads of possibility. Looking at my paintings becomes a sensory adventure of discovery that starts when I begin to paint and continues with the act of viewing. My work is now the foundation for my teaching as I seek to engage my students as a college professor. The by-products of my career are the piles of built-up and layered sketchbooks and paintings that have accumulated over the years. I spend my time painting between two studios. My creativity like my paintings evolves as a constant, ongoing process of trial and error that seems directed in a subconscious but human fashion. My work seeks a more heightened relationship with color and image and is striving to be painterly and gestural.