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I started drawing and painting at a young age. When the kids in the neighborhood were outside playing I always preferred being inside, usually drawing. As I grew up I focused on Art in school, with the nagging “you should try something else, you don’t want to be a starving artist” playing in the back of my head. I ignored all that and majored in Art in College, getting my BFA from VCU and my MFA from Rutgers University, and then I starved lol.
I think I'm still wrapping parts of the new series around my head. The jumping off point was really online hookup apps. Apps are curious things, they change the way we interact with each other. We are somewhat anonymous and are free to say things we wouldn't say in person. The current series started as a response to seeing "are you clean?" in guy's profiles. Sometimes it refers to STDs but more and more it refers to poz and undetectable guys. It made me wonder, what is dirty? Where is the line between taste and discrimination? Is someone who is poz less of a person, damaged?
I paint men in pools. They are not erotic paintings, at least I don't view them that way. More, they are profiles and representations of profiles I've seen online. I love pools and water for all the rich metaphors they come with, along with the distortion that happens from the outside viewing into the pool. To me it's ironic because my early work was about the pool of humanity and social inclusion, and now I'm using pools to question inclusion within the group inside the pool.