Biography

I was born and grew up in the capital of California, Sacramento. Sacramento is fundamentally rather conventional in its thinking, yet manages to produce a fair number of artists. I think the process is one of mutual irritation, like the way an oyster produces a pearl.

I majored in art at college, graduating with an A.A. degree from Sacramento City College and a B.A. degree from California State University, Sacramento. I studied with a wide variety of teachers: Greg Kondos, Darrell Forney, Robert Else, Carlos Villa, Esteban Villa, Irving Marcus, Steve Kaltenbach, and John Fitz Gibbon, among others. I gained something from each: knowledge, techniques, attitudes.

But I probably matured more as an artist in the three or four years immediately following graduation; my production increased, my skills sharpened, and my identity as an artist was reinforced, in a self-directed campaign that took the place of participation in a Master's program.

Not being an official grad student, but needing space in which to paint, I learned to operate in stealth mode. An art ninja, I trundled a bike trailer full of art supplies to the Art/Sculpture Lab, a cavernous Quonset hut on the outskirts of the sprawling campus, arriving late in the evening after classes had ceased. I would paint all night, then leave at dawn for my girlfriend’s apartment, a new painting, freshly dry, bungee-corded to the trailer.

By 1979, I felt ready for commercial galleries. I then had an active and fairly intense succession of solo and group shows through the early 80s, in Sacramento, Roseville, and Amador City in the Sierra foothills, but by the mid-80s I had started to feel that art was a dead end. Sales had come, but my prices were still low and I had never gotten a review. Despite a lifelong commitment to art as an essential part of my identity, I voluntarily renounced it, or at least object-making, for the better part of fifteen years. I didn’t give myself wholeheartedly to any other career during this time (except a brief period when I explored my other artistic identity as a writer). I didn’t have a career during this period, I just had jobs: menial temp work that used my body but put no claim on my heart and mind.

In 1996 I discovered the Burning Man Festival and was renewed by it, even becoming a performer in 1999 and 2003. But painting reasserted itself as the primary creative activity in my life, and I once again embraced it. It was clear to me now that, as miserable as I had been as an artist struggling (and failing) to find recognition, I was even more miserable without the fulfillment of making art itself. It no longer mattered whether I ever “made it” as an artist. Making the art would have to be enough.

Paradoxically, this renunciation of result for process set me free to again approach galleries, and I had a successful run at Ruland's Furniture and Art Gallery (Sacramento) in 2006, and recently (August 2007) had a solo show at Artisan Gallery in North Sacramento.

I have a lot of art left in me, varied and divergent, and my new policy is to let it all out: “Let no idea go unexpressed.” So, whether it cares or not, the world is due to get more art from me. Some of it will find an audience and some of it won’t. The important thing is to give it birth.