1970s My father had signed these for me when I was either 5 or 6 years old. I remember the smell and consistency of these paints.
My older sister (just by 13 months) had one of those books on artist for children and she would copy a drawing that Van Gogh did everywhere, to me it seemed like she was very passionate about this one particular image. She also created other art that fascinated me.
1978 – 1982 I used to get acrylic sets for Christmas when I was in grade school.
1982 – 1986 When I was no longer getting Acrylic sets for Christmas, I moved on to my 64 box of Crayola Crayons and started playing with color schemes. I acquired another brand of crayons for a wider color selection.
After high school I went to a community college, College of DuPage and got an associates in Science degree. Going to a community college turned out to be one of the best things for me. I was able to take a wide range of courses which allowed me to narrow down my interests. It also took care of a lot of credits I would need to graduate from a four year college.
~ 1988 The image on the left is what I call my ameba. It’s the drawing that makes me think about turning all these lines I have been playing with into something recognizable. The image to the right is the first time I brake away from the abstract and make something identifiable with stripes.
I set my sights on The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (with my parents disapproval).
This is a small sample of what I did at SAIC. I graduated with a BFA. At the time I was at SAIC, I also worked at UPS in the hub as a sorter and freelanced as a graphic artist.
I took a color theory, sculpture, drawing and painting classes and of course art history classes. I loved the course I took on the history of Japanese woodblock printing. At this time I was way into Van Gogh and Georgia O’Keeffe as well. I read and looked at everything I could about these two artists.
While working at UPS and meet someone that convinced me that painting in oil would be a good transition and a way to work with colors more easily. This painting is 3′ x 3′ and I remember struggling with it and thinking that I didn’t know if I would ever make anything better than this. This is one of my very first oil paintings.
Blue Sky 1996 I wanted to play with the color blue, put it up against many other colors. The idea came to me when I was looking at a cloudy sky with a few bits of sky showing.
When I painted Tiger 1, I had it all planned out. One side was going to be cool colors the other warm and I was going to have vertical stripes identifying the black stripes of the tiger. By the time I got to painting the 5th Tiger, all of a sudden I got an image in my head of how it was going to look. It was like all the years of playing with different color schemes finally became intuitive as far as picking out colors was concerned.