Whimsy and Weight – Where the pieces are sometimes serious, sometimes silly – but always colorful. My art spans both of these extremes, from cartoonish light pieces of Whimsy and more emotionally resonant pieces of Weight.

Whimsy
Cartoons and illustrations have been formative in the development of my art style. I draw inspiration from everyday things, both in my serious pieces and my not-so-serious pieces. While I enjoy the deep connection to personal stories in some of my emotionally charged series, I often enjoy getting back to my more cartoony, stylized roots. Most of the time, that means my inspiration comes from a different personal joy, my spouse, Chris, and my pet rabbit, Rake. This has resulted in “Snack Bunnies” – silly bunnies as silly foodstuffs which started as (and continues to be) a joke among two silly people.

Weight
Both in my work in medical product design and as a self-taught artist, I am motivated by deeply probing challenges and adversity affecting those around me people. In my day job, I tease out solutions to hard problems facing doctors and patients. In my art, I tease out beauty from broken, ugly, or frightening things. With both, I admire and celebrate the resilience of people impacted by adversity, such as mental and physical disorders. My series, “Fleuroma”, is an exploration of the impact of cancer on its hosts. Each piece honors a close family member or friend who has been indelibly marked by their battle, their tumors rendered as impasto flowers. My other series, “Kintsugi”, is a triptych showing the progression from feeling broken and lost in the face of anxiety and betrayal to reformation and transformation as shown through the use of gilded accents as in the Japanese art of Kintsugi

Colors fascinated me as a child. I remember scribbling and coloring on the walls of our home! Of course, I was reprimanded for my generous acts of creativity! Thank God for my parents, I grew up and grew out of painting on objects that were not meant to be painted on! That summer, my parents enrolled me in an art class, and it opened a whole new world for me. I realized that painting was not only meditative but also a powerful medium of expressing one’s thoughts via colors. Creating felt like poetry to me. The more I immersed myself in the beauty of this medium, the more I discovered the candor it gave me. My style is predominantly abstract. I use mixed media, oil, and acrylic on canvas. I believe in not limiting my creativity to painting but in using diverse, non-traditional elements and techniques to create. I feel fortunate to have had my work appreciated and commended at various national and international shows and exhibitions. My artistic journey has been paved with unending love and support from my family.

I view the world in a fantastical and dreamlike way and I am enamored with contemporary popular culture. Everything is always new to me and I delight in experimentation. Odd moments with people, the natural world, and objects catch my attention. I seek to surprise the viewer and myself with unexpected perspectives. My philosophy is to work without the critic on my shoulder and let my imagination be my guide. I am about to let go and follow the strongest voice in my head.

Inspired by a biology course at Copper Mountain City College, attracted by the beauty of desert wildflowers, and curious as to what they looked like in detail, I decided to point a lens at them.

In the early 60’s Irving Penn did an annual spread for Vogue, one species every year. These were close-ups of flowers. Photographed in a studio against a white background, with vibrant colors, stunning detail, and composition, and printed on a glossy stock. Perfection.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s book on “Flowers” was a strong influence. While Penn’s work was in close, Mapplethorpe stepped back. Working with strongly colored and shadowed backgrounds, and vases of different colors and shapes, the flowers became divas.
Mapplethorpe’s work in this book is a masterclass on intimacy, color theory, and design.

Add to this stew of influences Henry Mockel’s incredible botanical illustrations and screen prints of desert wildflowers. The vibrant colors and laying out the parts of flowers as botanical illustrators do take the viewer through the entire life span of a flower in one sitting.

My intention became channeling Penn, Mapplethorpe, and Mockel, to create botanical photographs of desert wildflowers that are indigenous to the Mojave Desert. Penn’s close-ups, Mapplethorpe’s color and compositions, and Mockel’s botanical layouts were to become the foundation of my floral imagery. To photograph them as the divas of the desert that they are.

I am an LA/Kauai-based artist who specializes in watercolor and pastels. I am forever seeking peace and spiritual tranquility in my work, drawn from a myriad of life experiences that have etched; people, landscapes, seascapes, animals, faces, children, and a zillion more images inspired from these cellular memories, into my very soul.

Working in water is like magic ~ When you finally tap a color into the invisible watermarks you lay, the magic begins as you tap darks for shadows, lights for highlights ~ trying to keep your values, just like in life.

You can wet the whole paper, saturate it in water, and sweep colors across to let them blend and mix at will. Let the water lead you, the colors, the mixes, the forms. You can try to control them, but wet on wet has its own life.

Of course, you can then let that dry and slice a hard line on top sending your blends into the background, defining your edges, and sharpening one’s focus into your subject.

There is so much diversity in watercolors, that one can only be limited by one’s own imagination. But if you are open to listening to the muse, tuning into the moment, the flow of the water can lead you where your imagination is endlessly open, allowing the kind of awesome creativity that real “Art” is truly made of. The kind of Art that takes you out of yourself and frees you of all limitations. This is my goal. To allow your eyes to rest on an image that will open and inspire your imagination beyond your physical world, allowing you to relate and yet freely fly…

I am newly retired from a career in dentistry. With my new free time, I try to draw every day to explore new compositions and other mediums, and most of all to improve my techniques. I really enjoy the texture of the .005 double-sided Grafix drafting film and its ability to erase easily and to apply fewer layers of colored pencil to achieve amazing results. Lately, I am inspired by subject matter that is “reflective” such as old classic cars with their chrome bumpers and mirrored objects such as a gold watch. I attend many car shows looking for great colors and reflective surfaces. I take as many photos as I can from all angles to use for my portraits. I am most proud of the smallest of details I can find in my photos to include in my pieces.

Summertime always evokes flowers for me. I love the colors, the form, and the textures. It’s a thrill to see watercolor move across the paper, giving just the right effect I’m going for. It’s impossible to improve on Mother Nature’s color combinations; pink and greens of all shades are my favorite. The details of the flowers and their structures intrigue me, I get very focused on realism and love the hard and soft edges I can achieve. I tend to choose subjects with these intricacies in mind. It’s a happy pursuit for me every time I sit down to paint.

In my photographic and interdisciplinary work, I am drawn to the intricate dance between nature’s five elemental forces – Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether – and the profound connections they share with the human experience. Every human experience is different and the same—nature, unites us all. I believe that by exploring these elemental interactions, we can better understand the delicate balance that sustains our world, interconnects us all, and the contrasting facets of nature relative to our own existence.

Earth, the foundation of all life, provides me with a canvas on which to capture the contrasting forces at play. The Earth serves as both a symbol of stability and resilience and a reminder of our own impermanence. In my work, the earth gives visibility in the form of materials and images.

Water, fluid and ever-changing, mirrors the spectrum of human emotions. Water reveals the dualities of serenity and chaos, much like the emotions that shape our lives. Water is also the foundational element in the development of these photographic processes.

Fire, the element of transformation and passion, evokes a sense of awe and vulnerability. It symbolizes the fiery intensity within us, capable of both creation and destruction and challenges us to find harmony within the raging infernos of our own desires. Fire translates to light and the development of images and allows the ability to capture light in photographic form.

Air, intangible and ever-present, speaks to the ethereal nature of our own thoughts and aspirations. The air holds the lightness and weight of our visions and ideas and can be unpredictable. Air, the invisible power, and space—the giver of the spontaneous and sporadic visions of creativity and inspiration.

Ether, the fifth element, often overlooked but undeniably present, represents the intangible connections that bind us all. It reminds us that our existence is intricately woven into the fabric of the universe, bridging the gap between our earthly struggles and our transcendent potential. Ether is the undefinable space where there is no form, where only endless expansiveness lives, allowing creativity room to birth and breathe.

My work aims to capture these elemental interactions and express the dichotomies and similarities that define our human experience. Nature, in all its wild and tranquil glory, reflects the constant tension between growth and decay, chaos and order, life and death, feminine and masculine, yin and yang, solar and lunar, creation and destruction—and the complete connection of it all.

Through my work, I hope to encourage viewers to pause and contemplate the interplay of these elements in their own lives, reminding them that within the chaos and contradictions, there lies a profound and harmonious connection between humanity and the natural world. It is my belief that by recognizing these elemental truths, we can foster a deeper respect for the environment and a greater understanding of our place within it.

My artistic journey began as a way to process memories from Iraq, where I served as a Route Clearance Team Leader/Truck Commander. Our unit was responsible for patrolling Iraqi roads to search for and destroy improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Military depictions in art, film, and stories tend to lean more towards caricature than honest portrayals. While being portrayed like an invincible superhero is flattering, what makes the men and women that serve our country in uniform inspiring isn’t a super power of invincibility… It’s a willingness to keep going despite vulnerability.

My military art depicts real scenes that actually happened, shown through the eyes of the frontline service members who lived them. A mix of the boredom and brotherhood, fragility and fear, chaos and courage that is experienced during a war-time deployment and the emotional baggage that is brought home with you afterwards.