Forget the trip to the art museum! The most beautiful masterpieces are right outside! Could be in your own backyard, at the park with your loved ones, a stroll or hike through the forest, or a rejuvenating walk along the beach…HECK, even a run-down parking lot can be stunning if you take the time to be mindful and look past the ordinary & find the little bits of the extraordinary. Immersing yourself in nature, even for just a little bit each day, can ground you. A way to bring your life “back to the basics”…simpler living…mindful living.

Don’t just “look” at a photograph…FEEL the emotion, the passion, the message, the love, the anxiety, the happiness, the fear. Look beyond the image and try to connect with the photographer (the human being behind the lens). A photo is an intimate invitation to a beautiful personal experience.

Rather than seek a signature style or body of work, what characterizes my work is the unexpected in terms of medium, subject matter, thinking process, and style. I enjoy each piece being somewhat disruptive and different from anything that has come before it. This approach reminds me of how each dream I have is always in an entirely new location, and I enjoy this element of surprise. I draw from nature, the man-made world of architecture, still life, the human figure, and the inner musings of my mind. Although I mainly paint abstractly on canvas and wood panels in oil, I also use acrylic, charcoal, wax pastel, watercolor, collage, and found objects. For the most part, the process of creating is more important to me than the end result. John Murray, my teacher at the New Art Center, states: “Painting is about paint.”

I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at me. These self-portraits portray growth, exploration, and identity. A range from autonomous identity-less figures to a direct self-representation, demanding attention with a forward gaze. Living in a patterned dreamscape, they include objects and imagery from my own life, of some kind of tactile quality. It is a conversation with myself, expanding into direct representation in conjunction with surrealism; the self as an autonomous object of desire and executive function. Still beings, in my image, operating a space exclusively of their own. Beginning in sculpture, my work took true to form when I began working with fabric. My soft sculptures were feminine reminiscent bodies without heads, hands, or feet. They were created as objects that commanded their inhabited space as if they were autonomous beings. When I leaned into painting last year and dove into oils, I took these preexisting images and themes and applied them to an introspective of myself.

Part of a set of 25, Sweet Tooth is a collection of resin sculptures encased in recycled makeup clamshell packaging. With the imagery of real human teeth inside each piece, they are a play on the recontextualization of beauty products and ideas of the male gaze and feminine vanity.
Each sculpture is 5”x7”x2” and $150 apiece, or the full set for $1500.

I am especially drawn to subjects in nature that have artistic potential. Using a variety of filters and tools in Photoshop I found a way to create art from a photograph. You might recognize the subject as a tree, but you can’t tell what kind of tree it is. The subject might look like cone flowers except the shape is altered or the color is more intense. Then again, the image is often altered to complete abstraction. Like any artist, I have a general idea of how I want the image to look. Inspiration often comes during the process of creation. It is not a mindless endeavor. The key to success lies in knowing what the filters can do and making choices that move the image in the direction I want it to go. I can alter color, and saturation, add or eliminate texture, darken or lighten any portion of the image, and move things around. While the choices in each filter package are limited, by using a combination of filters the outcome is infinite. There are a few images I have gone back to work on again and again, each time improving them as I gained expertise in Photoshop. I now find using Photoshop as a stepping stone to creating art images just as exciting as straight photography, sometimes even more so. I often wished I could travel the world over, discovering new locations and subjects, but that was never an option for me. Like Robert Frost, I have taken the road less traveled and it has made all the difference. I love what I do. In the final moment of creation, when there is nothing left to change, I feel that sudden ‘aha’ moment the Gestalt psychologists described. It’s exhilarating, like diving off the high board for the first time. The excitement is definitely in the journey, but inevitably, the moment fades and I am back to work on another image.

The path of my life as an artist was set with my first show. I was working on my master of Fine Arts from George Washington University. Since I was not required to attend classes in my final year but only to paint and write my master’s thesis, I decided to move to the south of France to a region where so many of my favorite artists had been inspired. I was painting in a village in Provence when someone stopped to look at my painting and asked me if I wanted to have a show in Monaco. It was my first show, and when it was successful, I decided that was what I wanted to do: travel, paint the people and places I saw, and figure out how to sell those paintings to earn enough for the next trip.

My travels became more and more exotic, starting in the Mediterranean and taking me to over 50 countries in Europe, Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. When I landed in the Sahara and met the nomads, I felt I had found a second home. Raised on a cattle ranch, I felt an affinity for the nomadic herders and lived and migrated with them for part of each year for 25 years.

On my second trip to the Sahara, I had been invited to travel with a rebel leader of the Tuareg insurgency. In the days before satellite phones and the internet, he wanted me to tell their story. Not knowing how, I said I would try.  This promise would color the rest of my life. I opened Nomad Gallery, which for 25 years showed the paintings of my travels and art forms I imported from the places I visited. As I came to understand the nomads’ culture, I became an expert advising ambassadors in an area considered too dangerous for them to visit and leading film crews and tourists.  Recognizing the poverty they lived in, I founded The Nomad Foundation to help my nomadic friends better their lives and preserve their traditions. My life as an artist had taken an unexpected turn. My curiosity and love of telling stories through my paintings led me to humanitarian work, which made a difference in the lives of thousands of nomads.

My artistic goal has always been to help my viewers understand and appreciate the people and places my travels take me, be it to Niger, Mongolia, India, or Indiana.

As one writer has observed, we live on a tilt-a-whirl in the middle of a carnival–stuck to a rotating watery ball, revolving around a gigantic star, spinning through a galaxy, whirling through the universe. How are we not dizzy all the time? Inspiration comes in myriad forms from these involuntary, yet glorious treks around the sun.

My work is unified by the non-traditional use of paper. I strive to create the effect of painting using only the colors and textures already present in handmade papers. I apply the paper to the canvas with an acrylic medium. Every work is an experiment, as each color or layered combination changes as it dries.

Like most artists, I choose subjects that are meaningful to me or impress me with their intensity and depth of color, or that communicate simple truth, goodness, and beauty. My work is successful when it touches more than the viewer’s eye and draws them into a shared moment, memory, or emotion beyond the limited expression of the subject.

My work seeks to capture deep emotional states, emphasizing both the strength and fragility of the feminine (energy that we all embody, both men and women), glimpsed within a state of alignment with nature. When we strip ourselves of our masks and materialism to face nature and remember the earth, a deeply personal dialogue of self-expression unfolds. These images attempt to capture this interaction through a process of discovery, an alchemy of sorts. A silent trance-like dance of immersion, during which the lines blur between eternality and impermanence. A doorway revealing the interplay and bond between both nature and the human form.

Through my work in medical and scientific visualization, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with medical professionals who described cells to me as systems similar to cities. Within these microscopic environments, there are structures responsible for defense, communication, transport, and survival. These conversations deeply changed the way I viewed the human body. I became fascinated by the idea that beneath human consciousness exists another world of invisible activity and interaction.

I was particularly drawn to the behavior of cancer cells. Although they are part of the body, they develop their own destructive patterns: rapidly reproducing, spreading, and attacking healthy cells. This led me to think about microscopic structures as forms of life with their own instinctive “awareness,” existing beyond human subjective consciousness.

In this work, yellow represents vitality, growth, and the positive energy of living systems, while black symbolizes destructive forces such as cancer cells and imbalance within the body. The abstract forms explore the tension between these opposing energies and reflect the invisible communication between the human body and the microscopic systems living within it.

Water plays an essential role in my process. Using water-based pigments and marbling-like fluid movements, I allow tension, diffusion, and organic flow to shape the composition naturally. These movements echo the behavior of cells under a microscope: constantly shifting, expanding, interacting, and transforming. Through this process, I aim to capture the vitality, fragility, and unseen life that exist beneath the surface of the human body.

Artist From Japan

While engaged in planning and creative work in the advertising industry
Interested in the fusion of design and art, starting production activities in 2022

With the theme of illusion and hallucination
He creates works that change the appearance by changing the viewpoint and angle.

Each abstract painting is titled with an original experience.
Sharing the point of contact between the product and the customer’s idea