About

I am an artist of beautiful words brightly rendered. Visually and stylistically, my primary inspirations come from the public art of Keith Haring, the Truisms of Jenny Holzer, the painted works of Howard Finster, and street artists more generally. In my use of text and poetry, I’m also influenced by the European tradition of illuminated manuscripts and their meticulously formal layout, combined with the decisive styles of graffiti artists. I like to work with quotations that use images from nature to say something about human existence; recent work and current work in progress includes prose by Ursula K. Le Guin and poetry by Osip Mandelstam, e.e. cummings, Barbara Crooker, and Stuart Kestenbaum.

My process has evolved over the past 8 years as I’ve developed artistic confidence and expanded my mediums and the scale of my works. As the medieval monks and nuns did, I start with laying out a grid using a ruler or yardstick and pencil, then sketching in the shapes of letters by working a quotation through from beginning to end. In most of my works, I retrace the quotation with increasingly bolder and often more colorful strokes, highlighting particular phrases to bring them into the reader’s mind more clearly. This is a form of meditation on the text, a secular form of the Christian monastic practice of lectio divina. I memorize the text by repetition, just as I hope passers-by will as they see it on their regular travels.

Since moving to Maplewood Square, Malden in 2021, my individual output has grown from small watercolor works on paper, hung in bedrooms and bathrooms, to increasingly larger site-specific installations using larger paper, bolder markers, and sometimes paint. In my 2023 work now visible on the fence at 26 Webster Street, Malden, I used acrylic interior-exterior house paint for a 5-panel work, each panel 2 feet by 4 feet, of Barbara Crooker’s poem “Reel.” This work required me to master some media new to me: a combination of Krink alcohol-paint graffiti markers, water-based acrylic markers, and traditional brush painting with house paints. 

In the future, I’m seeking locations around Malden for art of a similar scale, either painted onsite or on installed panels.