PORTFOLIO

2019-2022

The Pilgrimage

Charcoal on Paper

9”x12”

2019

Pondering In The Black of Night

Charcoal on Paper

18”x24”

2019

Poisson de Sang

Watercolor on Paper

18"x24"

2020

Asheville’s First Baptist Church

9”x12”

Charcoal on Paper

2021

Isolated Anxiety

Oil on Canvas Board

12" x16"

2021

A Test in Memory

Oil on Canvas

18"x24"

2021

The Climate of Rapture

Oil on Canvas

24"x36"

2022

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Background

Born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, I knew that I wanted to be an artist because of how unbelievably strong, thriving and awe inspiring the art community has been both throughout Asheville’s history and within my own lifetime. Seeing the combination of intricate traditional art and strange psychedelic art everywhere I went in the Downtown area through the support of local businesses and restaurants was always one of my favorite parts about living in Asheville as a kid diagnosed with autism since the way that I saw the world at that age (and even now to a lesser and more controlled extent) was very sensory based. I would spend an extensively prolonged period of time looking at the art in the city in a way where I would hyperfocus on even what would seem like the most mundane/insignificant pieces of detail of any given work of art to the average person because I found the individual details, marks and strokes to be visually stimulating and pleasing. This early experience would lead me to develop an artistic style based largely on impulsive marks and strokes in a way that creates a more sensory based experience.

Process

The general process for me as an artist is to create a sense of mood and atmosphere that not only invokes specific emotions that helps guide the audience through a narrative driven experience, but also feels cinematic in nature in the process. To achieve this, I attempt to maintain a sense of realism that makes my art feel tangible while also making room for my impulsive and expressive strokes and marks that not only helps enhance the intended mood or atmosphere, but also makes it feel otherworldly in a way that, as stated before, lends itself to a sensory based experience. In that sense, you could say that this approach is comparable to Expressionist Art but with a twist. As for choice of medium, I primarily work in Oil, Charcoal and Graphite and I’m currently experimenting in Digital Art with a particular program that does an excellent job at emulating the tangibility of materials such as pencil and watercolor. But regardless of the medium, my process always involves a large amount of layering whether it be as simple a layer in a program like photoshop or I use fixative for my charcoal/graphite work or oil mediums for my oil paintings as a way to very lightly overlay with layers to varying levels of transparency until I get the right color or texture that I’m looking for.

Goals

As someone with a keen interest and attentiveness to everything going on in the world, I’ve never shied away from drawing attention to contemporary issues that are not only being faced in my home country of The United States of America on both a local and national level, but also those being faced in other countries regardless of whether or not it might invite controversy or scrutiny. This is one of many forms that my art takes as a way to not only document these events as they’re happening in the moment, but also as a way to capture what the general headspace and mood was like for me at the time of making any given piece as well as others that lived through those similar- if not, identical- moments in history for future generations that ask the question “what was [X point in history] like to actually live through?” or “what did [x place] look like in [20XX]?” to look back on.