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 was raised in a Italian Catholic environment in the California Central Coast. In this particular culture, human senses are filled with stimuli: objects, sounds, and smells that punctuate the sensual landscape and direct the viewer, both physically and spiritually, toward the Divine. Secular and sacred experience becomes blurred. Here I also learned a deep love of the human identity and the human body, which was also coupled with a early 80’s feminism that worked against the objectification of the other. This was my primary knowledge of embodied life, faith, and the arts: no divisions, the three feed and support each other.
In my adolescence I transitioned into the Protestant tradition, which tends to organize the world into very distinct categories of sacred and secular. Despite this I did gain a love of narrative and text, and the skill of meditation and prayer, which has become a central well of enrichment for my work.
Later, after having drawn much from my spiritual heritage, I started to step out of my ecclesiastical contexts to learn from the plurality of popular culture and the larger art world, and began my graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute. There I learned to hear the visual voices of other individuals and 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 still was open to dialogue with others.
In addition to my professional art career, I am an independent art educator. Teaching courses in art from middle school to graduate school levels. I live with my artist wife in the California Central Coast.