Dude Nugget Painting

I have been drawn to art my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are those spent on the living room floor drawing for hours on end or painting with watercolor paints in my mother’s studio. Yes she was an artist and always encouraged me to follow my passions in art, graphic design, photography, sculpture and other creative endeavors. I have been working professionally for more than 40 years in the graphic design industry, but art has always been my first love. Actually, that is a falsehood. Anything visually creative has always been my first love. Even during a three year attempt at becoming a mechanical engineer I was constantly painting, drawing, photographing, documenting. In the early 1980’s I thought I wanted to become an engineer and embarked on a four year degree program only to realize at one semester shy of graduating it wasn’t for me. Oh the folly of youth. In 1986 I dropped out of college and took two years off, spending time on the west coast, traveling, creating and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Since I was sixteen years old I had been working in the graphic design industry doing everything from paste up to stat camera operations. I had a talent for layout, typography, color, and illustration. So as I tried to sort my early twenties out I continued to work in that field and it eventually became a career for me that has lasted into my early sixties. Along the way, I decided to go back to college earning a bachelors degree in fine arts at the University of Kansas, and later a masters in Design Communications from Pratt. Working in the graphic design industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a pivotal time for me. The transition from analog tools and techniques to digital was in full swing. I find myself blessed to have come into the arts during this time. The old school craft ways helped me hone my ability to draw, paint and think about visual design and visual arts, while the computer opened a whole new world for me. Today I still draw, paint, and take photos on a daily basis, but I am truly a digital artist now. All of my finished work is touched by the computer at some point, even if it going to be printed an manipulated at another stage. Recently I have begun a series of digital collages influenced by artists like Joseph Cornell, Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, John Baldessari, as well as other notables form the 1960s and 70s like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others.