I grew up in East Liverpool, Ohio, and came to painting late — my first child arrived in 1999 and something opened up. I bought canvas and acrylic paint and started with buffalo, painting the same image twenty times the way Degas suggested. That kind of repetition taught me more than I expected.

​

From there came a Corazón and Sacred Heart series, devotional images built around tin hearts, barbed wire, and flame. Those paintings found their way into private collections across the United States, Canada, and South Korea.

​

Over time the work has changed. The figures have loosened, the forms have broken open, and the paintings have become something more abstract and harder to name. Barbed wire still shows up — it has been with me from the beginning — but now it appears as a mark, a border, a scar across the canvas.

​

I am a professor at Syracuse University, and also a poet, singer, and songwriter. The work across all of those forms comes from the same place.

​

I paint in acrylic and mixed media, mostly on canvas, from Syracuse, New York.