Color Plus More Color

Hello! I’m a resident of Missoula, Montana, by way of Tucson, Arizona.

I am self taught, and newish (2023) to this kind of painting, though I have an extensive creative background.

I’ve been a horse trainer, touring musician, band leader, songwriter, jewelry maker, furniture maker, and more recently, a clothing designer and textile artist.

I like painting on canvas and wood, mainly with acrylic, but sometimes spray paint, pastels, charcoal, and pencil. I also love making light fixtures incorporating found components and animal hides, leather, shearling, and fleece.

Color, pattern, and animals are always interesting to me. Especially color. Like the way certain colors look next to each other. Or big matte fields of color with no sheen or reflection.

Right now I’m painting a lot of mammals of North America, as depicted by John J. Audubon. To me, his animal drawings are really compelling; sometimes cartoonish and obsessive in their detail.

Audubon himself was a slave-owner, a grave robber, and a falsifier of scientific results. His exhaustive cataloging of each species is in line with a colonial tag ‘em and bag ‘em mentality, but there is wonderment in there too. And the animals themselves remain magnificent, strange, defiant.

Placing the animals over contemporary backdrops allows me to think about the tension between the natural world and the built world. The way we use animal imagery to decorate our spaces at the same time we seem determined to eradicate them is weird. We’re weird.

These paintings take me many hours, and require a concentration and close attention that can be very immersive. Occasionally I’ll find myself moved to tears, overcome by a sort of worshipful tenderness for each animal. I feel like I’m building an entire life form hair by hair.

Oh yeah, and between the tight, close animal paintings, I like to do some loose abstract pieces, to un-kink my brain.