Artist Statement:

When I was a boy growing up outside New York City, our elementary school art teacher organized a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The experience was life-changing. All manner of art from ancient civilizations to the contemporary was on display, and it opened a new and wonderful world to me. I was particularly drawn to a large, plain canvas that took up almost an entire wall in one of the galleries. In the middle of the canvas was a tiny dot. That was it. My classmates laughed about it uproariously, of course, and made the usual comments about how it wasn’t really art, anyone could do that, etc. Not me. I was intrigued. Being a lonely, troubled kid from a turbulent family, that dot spoke to me. It too was alone, small, unnoticed in the middle of a giant white sea. I looked at other modern and contemporary works in the museum with enormous interest and realized that there are people out there who see the world differently than most and express it. I understand them, and they seem to understand me. It filled me with feelings of belonging and hope which I desperately needed. I began seeking out more of this thing called “abstraction” in addition to exploring parallel expression in music, literature, dance, and other art forms. Since then, art has been a constant joy and inspiration. Today I try to create my own pictures. It’s challenging, but when it works, deeply rewarding.