“Raised with three other adoptee siblings in the south suburbs of Chicago, I found my way into art making early by discovering an aptitude and love for drawing.  This led to painting lessons as a kid and these have remained some of my happiest memories of that time, as I discovered an activity that allowed the child me to expand a bit and connect with an inner space of emotional richness and in which I felt in control.  This discovery was powerful, but so was adolescence, and I drifted from art making during those years, coming back to it in high school through the influence of an earnest art teacher.  The making of art felt like an honest way forward, and I enrolled in the University of Illinois for a BFA in 1984, but I was not happy there and left two years later.

Those were difficult years.  I still felt the call to be an artist of some kind, but the need to support myself spoke with urgency, and I discovered carpentry and fashioned a career out of it.  It allowed me to continue to make things, and for a long time that was deeply satisfying.  I met and married a wonderful woman, raised a son and daughter, and thirty years flew by.  Through it all I found my early bond with art making had never left, and while the nation paused briefly during Covid, I found my way back to art through collage.   It wasn't the first time.  I'd done collage work on and off ever since my early exposure to the European Dada artists in the early decades of the 20th century, and also the great German artist Kurt Schwitters and his extraordinary collage expressions, part of a body of work he called ‘Merz’, whose aim was to "create connections, if possible between everything in the world".  Collage, with its emphasis on combining material, texture, and visual and sensual information in ways the mind does not normally associate together, is uniquely suited for such an ambition.  I, immediately, and deeply, related to these aims, and its potent expressive and spiritual possibilities.”  

Many artists create in an effort to transcend their individual lives in the hope of tapping into something more expansive and with richer collective meaning; collage in its many forms can provide an efficient means to do just that as it usurps the familiar into forms not seen and opens to possibility of the unexpected.  One can elevate the everyday and mundane into another realm; a ticket stub or long discarded object in one of Schwitters transfigurations can become something else, and they are allowed to reveal their latent poetry through its interactions with the other elements in the work.  As one whose life at times felt fragmented and hidden, such possibilities of expressive "re-ordering" and renewal felt deeply meaningful to me.”

The act of collage, then, for me, is an attempt, out of the stuff of the everyday, to create an aesthetic "spark", while also allowing the possibility of honoring the forgotten and plain, the discarded.  It is this ironic possibility that I find so thrilling: the ordinary and temporal "stuff" of the world can combine in a way that is anything but ordinary, and possibly speaks of other realms the human heart and mind can sense.  Out of trash we can claim our poetry.  These collages, then, are my efforts to open that portal.”