I come from Keokuk, Iowa, and I'm now working in New York. I’ve always been interested in the language of gestural abstraction, but I don’t approach it romantically. What matters to me is tension—the push between muscular, physical mark-making and a disciplined underlying structure. There’s anatomy in the work. There’s geometry. What feels spontaneous is rarely accidental. I want every move to carry both instinct and awareness.

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At FIT, where I teach, I push disruption over decoration. I’m not interested in surface for surface’s sake, and I ask my students to question material, context, authorship, and cultural baggage. Those same expectations apply to my own work. Nothing I use is neutral.

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Before painting full-time, I worked in advertising, including on the Absolut Vodka campaign. I’ve said before that I worked “in the belly of the beast,” and I mean that. That history isn’t something I distance myself from—it’s something I use. In my paintings, I embed smashed Mini Absolut bottles, fragments of luxury packaging, and other pieces of consumer culture directly into the surface. The crushed glass—used one mini bottle at a time—isn’t decorative. It’s structural. It creates texture, but it also functions as a kind of indictment. It reflects American consumption habits back on themselves.

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I often build the paintings on a constructivist grid. The grid gives the work a skeletal framework—something that can hold tension, contain volatility, and anchor the brushwork. I’m not interested in chaos for its own sake. The grid allows me to test how much pressure the system can take before it fractures.

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The work constantly balances opposites: automatic drawing and anatomical reference, chance and control, personal history and cultural critique. For me, abstraction isn’t an escape. It’s a confrontation. It’s a way to deal directly with the residue of image culture, branding, and spectacle.

I don’t see the work as an exorcism of my past in advertising. It’s more of a reclamation. I’m taking the materials and visual language of mass persuasion and forcing them into a different conversation. The questions that drive me are straightforward: What does authorship mean in a culture saturated with images? Can sincerity survive irony? And how do we make something authentic out of the very systems we once helped build?