I was born in the midwest United States in 1975. I have always drawn pictures, and I have been fascinated with drawing and painting since I was very young. I began to really paint and make art at age 15, influenced by surrealism, symbolism, abstract expressionism and comic books. I was also pretty heavily influenced by 1980s era hip hop and graffiti culture. I drew and painted on everything; paper, canvas, old furniture, sidewalks, trains and walls. Although I did attend university in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, my art has always seemed to be a process of self discovery and self critique. After leaving the midwest for Northern California in 1998, I worked as a carpenter, married, and started a family. I have continued to paint as much as I can, and over a 10 year period my work has gradually developed into its current form.

The paintings that I am trying to make walk a fine line between observed realism and abstraction. If three people see the same event, they will all have very different perceptions of what occurred, of what they really saw. I am very interested in this gap between perception and absolute reality. I want my paintings to capture a moment in time, but also beg the question, Are you really sure that this is real?. A lot of the imagery in my work ends up being somewhat dreamlike, where it seems real but it also seems off in some way. My painting process often involves making very observationally based drawings and underpaintings and then partially obscuring them or causing some sort of disturbance.

The process of making a painting is as important to me as the finished product. I try to visually represent this process in the finished work. I paint a painting in many sessions and many layers, trying to push the work to resolution, but at the same time the painting itself forces me to respond to what is already there.