I am a self-taught human and a soul-taught artist.

 

Before I became a visual artist, I was a writer. Words taught me rhythm, weight, silence, tension, and the responsibility that comes with communicating something to another human being. Painting eventually became another way of writing.

 

I paint from somewhere between my shoulders, not my ears.

 

That distinction matters to me. I am interested in what happens before intellect has time to organize feeling into something safe or easily explained. Color, gesture, language, movement, memory, joy, fear, love, anger, and hope arrive together. I allow them to find their own order on the surface.

Perhaps that is why abstraction feels natural to me.

 

If someone were to take residence inside my head, I once said it might resemble a room full of over-caffeinated kindergarten children. Thoughts move everywhere at once. There is joy beside caution, peace beside fear, confidence beside uncertainty. Abstract painting gives that internal movement somewhere to exist without requiring it to become one thing.

 

I value abstraction because it leaves room for the viewer.

 

A painting may begin with my experience, but I do not believe it belongs exclusively to my interpretation once another person stands before it. Every person arrives carrying a different history. Those experiences train the soul to see differently. What one viewer discovers may not be what another sees, and neither response is necessarily wrong.

 

That freedom is fundamental to my work. Language is equally fundamental.

 

In 2011, I began developing Artconography™, my own visual language system, which became the foundation for Abstracproseality™. Through it, letters, words, poetry, and prose become visual elements within paintings. Sometimes the language can be recognized. Sometimes it disappears beneath color and gesture. Either way, it remains present. I call the result technicolor prose.

 

The viewer does not simply read the language. They experience it.

 

My practice also moves beyond the solitude of the studio. Through performance painting, I work inside music, public space, history, and collective emotion. I am interested in what happens when painting becomes an event rather than simply an object produced after an event has passed.

 

Walking on Air, created outside the Hennepin County Government Center as the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial was announced, clarified this for me. I was not painting a historical moment from memory. I was physically inside the moment while its outcome remained unknown. The painting changed as the emotional environment changed around me.

 

That relationship between art and humanity is central to my practice. I believe artists have an obligation beyond making beautiful objects. Art can comfort, challenge, question, document, provoke, reveal, resist, and participate in public discourse. Beauty has value, but I am interested in what beauty can carry with it.

 

My work speaks about love, joy, pain, memory, justice, freedom, identity, and our capacity to recognize one another as human. I want the work to wake people up, sit inside their heads, and spin their imagination like an old soul record.

 

I guess that makes me a DJ of a different sort.