About The Artist

photo by Jeff Terzi

Like you, I made unrefined drawings as a toddler before I had the ability to comprehend what I was doing. In our first language of visuals, we can communicate through simple lines and colors. In the beginning, I didn’t know anything about artists or techniques. I just liked to make things. It was my grandmother who inspired me to take brush to canvas; it was her love of the arts and my love for her that kindled the love of all art in me. I recall her brushing the cerulean and umber, squeezed out of acrylic tubes and down canvas fronts, anticipating the secret that would be revealed. I awed at the forms developed from out a nebulous accretion of strokes. By age five, I had discovered art was my choice of communicating sentiments that were too big for my tiny tongue to tell.

We’ve all made art. Can you remember the freedom of grasping a crayon and scribble across a negative surface? But most people stop. I make art because I never stopped from childhood. Art is something that I do because I have to, I am compelled to, it is intrinsically part of who I am.

Art is labor, and not as glamorous as adolescent dream’s imagined. You wait for the inspiration to come and inspiration has its own schedule. Inspiration is fickle, and creation sometimes shows cruel realities. It regularly involves ego testing and compromises. It has to be balanced with practical needs and unfortunately monetary restrictions. It is working toward a goal and sometimes having to rework that goal completely. And then there are the less rational feelings and the more primal needs, as though the art itself has been birthed out of me. Art is everything to me.

I don’t know if there is a simple method I use to create art that I can describe in words. I believe strongly that art training and practice is a necessity for any professional artist, but that it is not interesting in itself to look at, as it is part of the vehicle which allows the exposure of something more evocative. I explore new mediums and tie them into my love and knowledge of the classical forms I grew up with. I play with boundaries and attempt to capture charged passion in order to have that emotion instinctively interpreted by anyone who views my art.

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“I try to record the things I’ve seen, whether the seeing is through these light-detecting organs or a more internal firing of neurons referred to as my soul, the eyes…they are a major symbol for me of who I am and the context of my reality.”