Born in New York. Raised in Virginia. Berkeley. Oakland. San Francisco. Hawaii. I’ve moved around a fair bit and done a lot of things. Not as much as some, but more than most. Along the way, I’ve been an engineering student, an art student, a butcher, a brick layer, a junkie, a house painter, a record store manager, a designer, a developer, a creative director… and most notably, I co-founded an art gallery/nightspot , thirtyninehotel, in Honolulu’s Chinatown District, as well as the bi-monthly short film festival, Showdown in Chinatown.
I am an artist. I am a designer. I am a photographer. I am an entrepreneur.
I appreciate beauty in all forms. I value subtlety. I abhor complacent mediocrity. I love wordplay.
Like many artists… Line. Color. Contrast. Composition. Emotion. Intellect. Humor. These are all things I’m concerned with, and they all come into play in one way or another regardless of what I’m working on. And of course, process is king. Whether it’s completely spontaneous or slow and methodical, the path that leads to a finished work of art is ultimately what makes it resonate.
Because my interests are so wide, and I explore so many different ideas, it’s difficult to truly sum up my work with one single passage. Rather, each work or group of works should be examined individually and in context.
One of my past instructors once told me, and I’m paraphrasing, “you’ll spend all your years in art school absorbing everything that you can from your teachers, from your fellow students, from everyone you meet. Then you’ll graduate… and spend the next ten years forgetting everything you ever learned from these people. At that point, you’ll have found your own voice, and you’ll finally be creating work that is your own.”
Well, here it is… just over ten years later. Have I found my own voice? Am I finally creating work that is my own?
Well, I’m definitely more forgetful these days…