About me
It has been an incredible, pin-wheeling journey to get to this point. My interests have always been quite varied: art, especially the art of Heinz Edelman and Peter Max just to name a few, math, science, literature, photography, all things space, railroads, movies. I briefly worked part time as a location scout when I graduated college, but the lack of work and hand to mouth, free-lance nature of the business didn't let me pay the bills. Besides, something else was calling me. Wanting to give back to the community, I got certified to teach math and English and took a job at a high school for at-risk students. Talk about a challenge.
To a lot of kids, math is nothing more than an esoteric exercise in repetitiveness. Solve for x, graph this, prove that. Over the course of my teaching career, I had to seize upon different approaches to make math more interesting and more approachable. Applying mathematic principles to making art was one of them. We tessellated. We created chaos. I also used cartoons. Far Side adorned my walls. Kids collected math related toons for me and we put them on the walls. Anything to stimulate and deepen our understanding of math and science, but especially math.
That was a career ago. But the use of math, especially the idea of using chance, probabilities and randomness to create art has stuck with me. We make choices all of the time in life and in art. An artist is faced with myriad of choices; the medium, the subject, the method, the color, and the constraints of those choices, just to name a few. I try to express that in my works and my cartoons. Sure, cartooning is a bit low brow, I guess, but it provides me an outlet..... especially for the absurdities.
I pull from a lot of sources. The psychedelic works of Peter Max, Heinz Edelmann, the sci-fi artist Mike Hinge, Phillipe Gaza and the comics of Mad magazines's Don Martin, The Far Side's Gary Larson have all inspired me in one way or another in my quest to create something a bit different and hopefully a little funny.