Biography

 

I was born and raised in a village located next to one of our nation’s largest biological/chemical warfare research facilities.  As kids, we often went fishing in the small lake that cooled the small nuclear reactor.  Fortunately, I never caught anything. 

I grew up in a house with artistic leanings.  My mom taught toll painting in the attic and my dad taught wood carving in the basement, while somewhere in between I explored performance art by melting toy soldiers with matches.   Fortunately, I never burnt the house down.

Our closed little village was the only all-white community in central Ohio, largely due to the local Klan meeting hall, which was located in old man Gregg’s run down gas station near my house (he even looked like an old confederate general).  The closest thing our village had to an ethnic minority was someone driving a foreign car.  Fortunately I left.      

            I’m still not sure why, but at eighteen I joined the army and learned to blow things up in the artillery.   I’m glad I experienced it, but I wouldn’t want to experience it again.

            In college I studied history and political science.  But my last year of studies I began to become more interested in beer, art history, women and sculpture.  So to mesh these worlds together into some kind of degree I created my own discipline:  “cross-cultural relations.”

 After graduation I spent a year living in Japan, studying its art and the mysterious ways of karaoke.  It was here that I began painting, while making a living teaching English.

            I then went to Seoul, S. Korea and stayed for six months, writing and illustrating children’s books.  I also went to the DMZ, which is the most surreal place on the planet.

            I spent the following summer teaching English and art and eating raw meat in a small Hungarian village.  After which I traveled around North Africa working on a series of paintings and wondering where all the women were hiding?

            Upon returning to Ohio for a while, observing the urban sprawl boom and strip mall bonanza, I decided to go to South East Asia for a one-month trip and ended up staying six months.  I visited some of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Pagan in Myanmar, Borobubor in Java and Padpong in Bangkok.  I also celebrated my 30^th birthday in Ho Chi Ming City at the American and Chinese War Crimes Museum.        

            After spending a year in Bonn and Cologne I moved to Berlin for a year. I studied painting with a group of German painters from the Art Academy of Leipzig and had the great experience in participating in “Art Forum Berlin 2002’ with an exhibition at Bohn and Zuo Gallery.

              In Columbus, Ohio I was living the artist’s dream.   I was on the board of the Ohio Art League.  I carved out a loft from scratch in a hundred-year-old shoe factory.  I then opened a café and later ran a small art gallery in the same building, so I hardly ever left. 

            Now I live in Edison, Washington. It is one of those very special and exceedingly rare places where several important ingredients for the good life come together in one spot.