“To paraphrase Piet Mondrian, I am always inspired by the exciting interplay between color and line. That interplay is what some people call beauty. The subject matter, like the dancing birds, gives people permission to look at the image and really dive into it a little bit. And then they discover, ‘Oh! This is kind of fun.’ I really want my piece to be happy to look at. I want people to enjoy it for what it is, even though it’s a flat piece of canvas.
I paint with acrylic paint. I’ve been doing research about what pigments last the longest, what pigments actually do. I’ve gone down the scientific route a little bit and I’m not a scientist at all. So that always looks like a messy hellhole going down into that realm, because I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t really understand what I’m studying. (laughs) But I’ve used that information to make my paintings quote-unquote ‘better.’ My goal is to mess with people’s perception when they look at a painting. Even though they don’t know that I’m messing with them, I want them to look at my painting and say, ‘There’s something oddly satisfying about looking at this piece.’
I’ve been doing caricatures for a while. What I enjoy about them is that they’re quick. They’re impulse drawings.
Every single sale to a stranger is an accomplishment to me. Somebody whom I don’t even know – like, I didn’t do any kind of romancing of them, I haven’t been talking to them for a while – they just come up and say, ‘Yeah, I like that one. I want to buy it.’ That’s always a huge deal to me. It gives my art value, plus it also gives me validity about what I’m actually trying to do.
I figured out that when I started making decisions in front of the canvas that are my own, without this fog of people behind me telling me what they want, that’s when people started paying attention to what I was doing. And that was kind of cool.
Painting rain barrels is huge to me. That’s when I think I began to receive notoriety for my skill as a painter and my drawing.
Goshen itself has been really welcoming of artists. The supporting cast around Goshen for the arts has been huge. Getting this horde of people together to show off their wares in various ways has been huge. The Goshen Arts Council thinking of us artists, the city of Goshen thinking of us, trying to find ways to use arts in most events – I think Goshen is mindful of how artists can be used to make the city a better place, and that’s always a fantastic thing.”
