Artist's Statement

Once upon a time, I worked as a software engineer. I lived a quiet, boring life, eating a lot of takeout salads and going to tech conferences. I also liked to draw, though, and I started keeping a sketchbook. One day, I got fed up with software, so I decided to get married, ride a bicycle across the country, and fill up four more sketchbooks, instead. After a year on the road and then a four-year trip back to art school, I went back to writing software - but I was never quite the same again. 

I make art because it forces me away from the screen world and into the real one. Art makes me use my eyes and it makes me use my hands. I use slow, tactile stuff: oil paint, ink, oil pastels, watercolor and fiber. My practice lives in the genuinely heartfelt irony of painting real life (as I remember it) from a doodle in a sketchbook and some bad photographs that I took with my phone.