Artists Statement

I make paintings, illustrations, and sculptures that are purposefully silly, quirky, bright, and occasionally juvenile.  I try to create art that makes me happy and makes me smile or laugh, and I hope my work makes other people happy.  Sometimes you need a painting of a drunken monster to make you laugh, or a psychedelic explosion of flowers and color you can stare at when you've had a bad day.

Many of my illustrations of monsters serve as stand-alone jokes: a neon-colored monster vomits stylized curlicues into the gutter, or a semi-demonic monster with rainbow wings takes up baking and rather seems to like it.  I use my monsters to play with ideas of humor, satire, and absurd incongruity by using intense, bright, sometimes childish colors to depict situations that deal with adult themes of murder, love, loss, alcohol, and implied drug use.

In other, less narrative pieces, I explore themes of color, pattern, and psychedelia.  I am very interested in the roots of psychedelic art in counterculture and its relation to modern cartoons and music.  I purposefully use repetitive shapes and patterns to make a dense visual field that the viewer can become immersed in. 

My sculptures of monsters take the figures from my more illustrative paintings and let them enter the world.  Scales that were a flat pattern in an illustration become tactile and touchable.   I use the monster’s detailed fur, scales, or feathers to explore ideas of labor and repetition.