About

I was exposed to art before I could read or write very well. My parents kept big art books and exhibition catalogs on the lower shelves of the family library, and I remember pulling them out and looking through them at our place in upstate New York. One of my favorites was my mother’s copy of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages from the 1950s. I still have it. I copied everything I could from that book, including a pretty good falcon-headed Horus when I was seven or eight.

Drawing became the thing I did all the time. It was not really a hobby. It became how I understood myself.

While my siblings went to Bronx Science, I went to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. I got to school early to paint with Irwin “Greeny” Greenberg and Max Ginsburg, and some days I would rather be drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art than sitting in class. I also took weekend classes at Cooper Union and went to open drawing sessions at the Art Students League. That early training still shapes the way I work: look hard, draw from observation, and take the figure seriously.

I later graduated from the City University of New York with a degree in art history, earned an MA in art history at the University of California, Davis, and received an MFA in painting from the University of Cincinnati. I worked as a curator at the University of Chicago and taught painting and art history in colleges for many years. That gave me a life built around pictures: looking at them, making them, teaching them, and thinking about how they work.

My paintings have changed over time, but the figure has always stayed at the center. I started with narrative figure painting, then moved into projects that included painting, installation, text, and portraiture. For many years, I also made queer and homoerotic figurative work, often outside the comfort zone of galleries that liked the craft but were less comfortable with the subject matter.

After many years of teaching, exhibiting, and selling work, I reached a point where I could step back from full-time academic life and from galleries that wanted the work softened or narrowed. That gave me room to work more independently, travel, look, read, and think about what kind of paintings I actually wanted to make next. The new work comes out of that freedom.

The work I am beginning now builds on that history, but the frame is wider. After several months traveling through Europe and the UK, looking at museums, cities, churches, old rooms, public spaces, and the way people move through culture, I am starting a new body of paintings about men, aging, queerness, ordinary rooms, private life, class, taste, memory, and the social codes that shape how people look at art and at each other.

I still think of painting as a direct, physical way of thinking. I work from drawing, photography, studies, memory, and art history, but the final test is always the painting itself. I want the pictures to feel observed, human, and made by hand.