Who I am.

     I am a father, husband, artist, painter, sculptor, writer, art teacher, vegetable-growing-life-enthusiast, and antiapartheid individualist who prays for good to manifest for anyone and everyone.

I have been painting my life and letting my life paint me, making no real attempt to sell my artwork until now. My grandfather was a self-taught painter and my initial inspiration. He duplicated my watercolors and had them framed when I was only three years old, and I studied his paintings throughout my childhood.

I ventured out of my parents home to Berkeley College of Music in 1995 and transferred to Massachusetts College of Art in 1997. A year later, after a serious brush with death, I left college and ordained as a Buddhist monk. I was twenty-one. During this period, I supported myself by working in construction, until risking lifelong injury, and working as a cook until the dead animals blocked my way and needed time to be freed. I also worked as a health care provider through the impossibility of it all, going beyond fear of death. 

By the time I had graduated from my bachelors program in Painting and Art Education in 2006, I was engaged to my now-wife (we’ve known each other for almost 20 inexplicable years) and had completed four years of formal Vajrayana Buddhist monastic training. A couple of years later I received a master’s degree, by studying the inter-relationship of experiential art practices, healing and meditation and writing a thesis, while giving a college a lot of money, to determine conclusively that compassion is real.

     Now, after twenty-five years of art study, I am ready to sell my work and begin art teaching in person, online and in those worlds of light that are beyond our institutions and classes, found within the direct and subtle confluence and emergence of layers of paint. A most ancient and contemporary profession. 

A few thoughts about life and painting. 

Painting is a process of connecting body and mind. When we separate ourselves from nature, seeing our body/mind as a separate reality, we create sickness. It is connecting back to the truths of who and what we are that inevitably results in health and healing from the individual/personal level, all the way to the cultural and planetary level of our illusory, seemingly collective, vast, interconnected, individual human lives. 

     To be an artist, you must be organized, and that is the most difficult part, because, for the true artist, reorganizing the universe is included. In particular, it is the work of artists to help to reorganize the mess that human beings have created for each other and this planet, so that we can once again survive and thrive. In the end I do hope that I can say “everything was possible because anything is possible.” 

Because art is able to build on itself and transcend time and space, it inspires new ways of being/doing that are intrinsic to us all. Art helps us reconnect with light, communications, and traditions that span generations and reflexively breathe life back into life. Co-creation, inspiration, one-of-a-kind, collaborative, intrapsychic idea production, beyond collective reductionism - art is all about this and this and this.

Art regenerates life, within life and into the beyond.

I am, therefore you are; therefore we are; and art is also just like this.