Biography & Cultural Influences

From the beginning of my creative pursuits I have been fascinated by the tensions and fusions between personal faith, the fine arts, and contemporary life. I grew up in the California Central Coast. My family is half Italian, so naturally I was raised in the Catholic Church, a tradition in which the visual arts make a comfortable fit with spiritual experience. The sacred spaces of Catholicism seek to fill the human senses with stimuli that direct the viewer, both physically and spiritually, toward the Divine. In Catholic homes and countries where Catholicism is dominant spiritual aesthetic objects, sounds, and smells punctuate the sensual landscape. Secular and sacred experience becomes blurred. This was my primary knowledge of life, faith, and the arts: no divisions, the three feed and support each other. My first mature body of work was an exploration in this kind of fusion and this philosophy remains a cornerstone in my identity and creative process.

When I transitioned into the Protestant tradition in my adolescence, I found that this important connection between faith and the arts was non-existent at best, hostile at worst. I entered this new tradition seeking theological simplicity and clarity, and I found it. However, along with clarity, I found that Protestantism, and especially American Protestantism, tends to organize the world into very distinct categories of sacred and secular. Typically, sensory experiences, and most of the arts with them, seem to be delegated to the realm of the secular and viewed with suspicion. In this context I found a space that was bereft of aesthetics, unless it was under strict parameters. Needless to say, I found this environment difficult to navigate as an artist. However, I completed my undergraduate arts education at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian establishment. Despite the frustration, I gained a love of narrative and text, and the skill of meditation and prayer that has become a central well of enrichment for my work. Thankfully in recent years, some areas of the Protestant church seem to be rethinking their relationship to the arts and the senses and is becoming a much different space than the one I knew as a young artist.

Later, after having drawn much from my spiritual heritage, I decided to expand my perspective to learn from the plurality of popular culture and the larger art world. I moved to San Francisco and began my graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. Unfortunately, though to be expected from my rather cloistered background, I found very little common visual vocabulary with individuals and organizations other than my own. As frustrating as my first attempts were, I learned to understand the visual voices of other cultures. I began to experiment with new vocabularies and consider the implications and multiple interpretations of various visual elements. Eventually, I began to hammer out an aesthetic that was rooted in my own history but was still open to dialogue with others.

Currently, I teach painting and drawing at Azusa Pacific University, and live with my artist wife in the city of Azusa. I continue my labor of finding visual bridges between the divergent realms of personal faith and public contemporary culture and the ways that identity is shaped in the tensions between the two.