About the Art:

My imagery is driven by a desire to observe and honor realistic forms while capturing sensations beyond what is readily visible. How do these environments sound and feel? How can I make the eye leap and frolic or rest with the figures? Many of my illustrations are meant to enhance accompanying text and reveal information left unsaid. How can I lead viewers to discover these details with me? 

Any success in these regards is simply due to a retained childhood urge to notice interesting objects or stories and shout, “Everybody come look at this wonderful thing I found!” There is something wondrously communal and spiritual about sharing those moments, whether in nature or in visual art.   

For me, these moments are sparked by geography books, maps, folk art, people with good senses of humor, the sensation of standing beneath 32-foot organ pipes, and existing in the presence of any animal. 

I love how film and printed media have evolved and influenced how we experience a sequence, how we still sense time and motion in static images. How a slight shift in composition or framing transforms a visual experience.  

The Face of the North Wind series explores questions of how to adapt a written description into a visual sequence, how to achieve more than simply repeating a text in a way that feels saccharine. George MacDonald’s fairytale about an incarnation of Death who is wild and dangerous yet playful and just offered a chance to convey motion through washes of freely layered blocks of color guided by more intentional, directional graphite. To interpret a traditionally ominous, looming entity as full of warmth, life, and ferocity.