Biography

I was born into a fast-developing Los Angeles in the 1950’s.

The world thinks it knows Los Angeles through movies, tv, ads and tourism. These public images aren’t LA-they are a mirage created for public consumption, just flickers of light. Because I was born here I know it through a long lifetime of journeys. I know that I love LA and hate it in the same heart beat. It is a city that frustrates any desire to trap it. It mutates of its own volition, always has and no one can stop it. It’s a city of moving parts that exists within a geometry of impressive expanse and beauty.

I began making paintings of my hometown in 1980. It wasn’t intentional-one day I looked out of my downtown studio window and saw a handful of skyscrapers a couple of miles away and I painted what I saw. The shockingly spacial vistas and the gridded neighborhoods of small houses where I grew up followed those first downtown paintings. It is within my paintings that I store my LA memories.

When I began painting at nineteen I had no thoughts of the kind of painter I wanted to become. None at all. I went to the San Francisco Art Institute to study photography. When I saw Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings for the first time at SFMA something within me shifted. I changed from photographer to painter. Studying painting in San Francisco was like studying cooking in Paris. At SFAI I learned about the Bay Area figurative painters with their expressive embrace of color and brush stroke and distinctly physical California attitude. I studied with a great abstract color painter, Sam Tchakalian. I took my new passion for the tactile, visceral experience of paint back to LA.

Selected Press