Artist Statement October 21, 2025

image: Late One Night in Millersville. 1984. Stone lithograph with collage. 20 x 26 inches

When I was young, reading fantasy books was a big form of entertainment for me and I loved exploring imaginary worlds and their maps. I thought I might want to be a writer but as time went on, I realized I enjoyed making up a place or drawing its map more than writing a specific narrative about it.

My initial interest in art was in painting and drawing and my preference for paper over canvas didn’t take long to appear. As a kid, I never had a complete “set” of any kind of art supply so working in mixed media came naturally to me, so if I was missing a color of paint I would sub in a crayon or marker or whatever. One of my first professors in college commented that if I was going to spend so much time on my drawings, I should learn printmaking. I took my first etching class at the end of my freshman year, and I realized that learning the many different printmaking techniques was the best way to use my time in school rather than continuing with just drawing and painting. From Miami Dade I went on to Florida International University for my BFA. Outside of those two schools there wasn’t much going on in printmaking in Miami at that time. I chose Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville for my graduate work. I worked as the lab assistant and as my professor’s printer during that time and did not do any teaching, so my first position out of school was as an Artist in Residence at Millersville University of Pennsylvania, and from there I moved to a better AIR position at the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts in Portland, where I stayed on another year and a half to teach. During a quarter off from that, at a residency in Ucross, WYO, it first occurred to me that moving back to Miami should be my next move. It wasn’t just that it was still snowing there in May, but that I realized that the works in my portfolio weren’t a cohesive body of work. Every shop I had worked in had different offerings and limitations. Every environment I lived in influenced what I was seeing and then doing in the studio. Printing in the shop alongside my students or working in the middle of the night were both already getting old. Something needed to change.

To make the work that was in my head, but which hadn’t found its way to paper yet, I needed my own studio. I needed to buy a press. And I needed to decide where to put that press.
Once back in Miami I taught myself silkscreen as something to try while saving money for the press, and surprised myself by realizing it was something my work had really been needing, mainly because of the ease of making multiple layers in opaque or transparent colors or something in between. It took a little time, and I worked some strange jobs, and I had a number of details to think through and options to reject, but I set up my press in a townhouse in Kendall in 1990 and started making combinations of lithographs, silkscreens and collographs, which I consider my “mature” work. That’s where the work on this website starts, with the exception of a Book Arts project I made in Portland in 1985, which is under the “Editioned Prints” portfolio.

I am forever grateful to my friends at Wash U in St. Louis for inviting me in to try out one of their etching presses because they do print litho plates extremely well and so allowed me to also continue working in intaglio and relief. Because of the size I was preferring to work, I had already concluded that stone lithography, which I dearly love, was not going to be a big element in my future work. Drawing on stones is a magnificent medium for black and white work, but I found that once I started layering colors, the plates worked fine because each element of my multi-layered prints were individually not as tonally complicated as one black and white stone.

Not long after moving to Miami I started making notes to myself about what my new work was going to be about, what images and references it might include, what media to work with and how to layer them together. I wanted to continue some of what I had done in the past but also bring in new things.

The South Florida environment has always heavily influenced my imagery and palette: I don’t think I realized that until I moved to Edwardsville IL – the transition was a little rough, but important to my development.

My work combines patterns and colors and marks as well as images, maps, photographs and drawings: they are a flat collage of these things, not an illusionistic window into another space. Sometimes I put things together for very specific reasons regarding content, or just because they visually seem to belong together. I don’t think knowing my reasoning helps with any appreciation of the work: I want it to be a starting point for the viewer’s own reflections.

After quite a few years in that Kendall townhouse, I bought a "single family home" in Olympia Heights, less than a mile from where I grew up. I do feel there is something about the neighborhood that fuels my imagination just as much as it did when I was kid.

I have divided the work on this site into two portfolios: editioned prints, and collages (one of a kind works that combine printmaking with drawing and painting). At this point in time my prints include lithographs from plates, intaglio and relief prints from zinc plates and collographs, and silkscreens mostly drawn by hand with filler though I have done a good bit of photo-silkscreen in the past. I also include inkjet printing in both the editioned prints and the collage works: these come from a wide variety of sources.