Over the years, my artistic journey has led me through various art media and styles. I began with drawing and simple painting, gradually expanding into different media such as watercolor, oils, acrylics, illustrative board and printmaking; even sculpture and jewelry.

As much as I have worked (separately) in each medium, I started to bring them together to form new work. Over time I've added spray paint and even house paint into the mixed media pieces I’ve created. I then incorporated other materials to create more textured and sculptural elements in my works.

Street art draws me in with its graffiti, murals, stencils, and posters in public spaces. I appreciate how it often addresses social and political issues with raw authenticity. And Pop art attracts me with its bold colors and recognizable imagery from popular culture, like advertising and comic books. I admire how it has become a critique of consumerism and mass production. 

Like the collaborations between Warhol and Basquiat, the “Street Pop” works I create reflect on modern culture in comparison (and contrast) to nostalgic time periods.

Just as we seek to make sense of the information and urban decay that surrounds us, these works embody our desire to “create order out of chaos.”

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time drawing surrealistic scenes. I was introduced to illustrative boards (or scratchboard) in a general art class. I was so enamored by it, I made an entire series of surrealist scratchboard pieces in black and white I called, “Windows,’’ which, by the way, I named before the software existed. Each piece was segmented into smaller vignettes, like windows into other worlds. It was rewarding, but extremely time-intensive.

Through three decades of using graphic design software, I developed a digital process to create larger pieces that had the same feel as traditional printmaking. Taking a queue from Native American culture, I named the series, “Dreamcatchers,” expressing surrealism as a dream state; a subconscious “window” to the soul.

The works themselves are based on the mathematical principle of the “Golden Ratio”, using intersecting lines (only during the creation process), objects are placed together to draw your eye around the surrealistic environment. Each piece contains approximately 80-100 layers of images and backgrounds blended together to form what you see. They are purposely created in black and white, initially to mimic a traditional printmaking style, but – more importantly – allowing the viewer to determine what is sky, land, or water.

Each limited edition giclee is 48” square. I found this was large enough to fully engage the viewer in the environment while also providing me opportunities to place objects that are no more than ½” in size into parts of the works. The viewer could spend hours searching through each piece; perpetuating a waking dream state.

Growing up I visited a number of Native American sites in the Pacific Northwest that contained pictograms (cave paintings) and petroglyphs (rock carvings). While taking an Art History class in college I saw a 15,000-year-old painting of a group of warriors, found in a cave in Spain. I noticed there were similarities across cultures in how prehistoric artists depicted their environment, and how they expressed their world.

I wanted to replicate these symbols on surfaces that also resemble the cave or rock on which they were carved or painted. So I developed a painting and texturing technique that mimicked stone or rock. Using large art paper, I painted, textured, and then hand-ripped these into smaller pieces, arranging them to appear as a rock wall; later into whole landscapes.

In order to accurately represent the ancient artwork, I created linocut reliefs that I used to “print” images onto the textured surfaces. I would then add more texture and even gold leaf to become sculptural reliefs that stand out against the backdrop of the surface.

As you look at an “Origins” piece, you can see three unique perspectives: 1) overlooking a geographic location from above; 2) looking eye-level at the paintings or carvings, and; 3) looking up, as if to the sky. Each perspective represents how the prehistoric artist viewed their world and interrupted what they saw and experienced.