Shortly after earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994, I essentially left art-making behind, instead devoting more than two decades to human rights and environmental activism. Then, in 2018, I moved with my wife from New York City to a sleepy fishing village called Nobiallo on Lake Como in Northern Italy, where I returned to drawing and painting after a hiatus of nearly twenty-five years. 

Photo by Kayana Szymczak

Today, at a time when technology's perpetual acceleration is splintering society at its most fundamental levels and warping our cognitive schemata, painting allows me to instantaneously connect to centuries of historical artistic practice, and I am admittedly seduced by the simple, primordial act of smearing pigment across a surface to create both an image and a record of my body in action.

Some recent work has been inspired by the history of the conflict between the partisans and the nazifascists in the villages, on the roads, and in the mountain passes surrounding my new home. Within my mostly abstract motifs appear figurative and landscape elements reflecting these narratives and my thrall to the ever-changing vista defined by the Lake Como and surrounding dramatic geography.

Toggling between abstraction and representation, introspection and protest, my compositions are visceral records of a process of personal reflection on political conflicts to which I have myself been a party, or philosophical lamentations in visual form, with an aim to evoke emotion and drama in gesture, movement, and color.

My work is held in private collections in Italy and the United States.

Three of my works are currently on view at Galleria Ramo in Como, Italy (through 16 July, 2022):
http://www.galleriaramo.com/4-project-room