a lot of morrissey.

what does a white young man, with really no drama in his life, from a perfectly acceptable, loving, hard working middle class background do when he gets to college. get angsty.

and listen to a lot of morrissey.

that said, while my family life in the southern suburbs of philadelphia was all sorts of normal, one of the traits that stuck with me the most was that of being a worrier and overthinker. this, in turn, lead me to close myself off from people and stress about the littlest of incidents.

and i could always turn to the smiths, depeche mode, and the cure anytime i needed someone to relate to. and get a little dancing groove too, of course.

to be honest, this angstiness started in high school, as did the listening of musical numbers by the before mentioned artists. but things escalated in college, i was free to explore these feelings in all sorts of shades of  grays and blacks.

at some point at the beginning of my junior year, i would turn away from any kind of recognizable figurative references in my work. i was looking at works by many of the abstract expressionist painters. the one i gravitated to the most was franz kline. loved the boldness of the brushstrokes, the forcefullness that is apparent in his work, and the speed of some of those marks.

i think that any young artist goes through periods of mimicking the masters. i think its important. i did it a lot with these abstract painters from  grandparents' generation. the subjects of my prints and drawings from this time were small, isolated shapes that looked as if they were often sinking down into or floating in the ambiguosly developed space that they occupied.

in some pieces there was a dramatic contrast between figure and ground and in others there developed a play with subtle differences of value and color. this subtlety would be revisited again in the dark landscapes i made at the end of my time in baton rouge four, almost 5 years later.

the works became more of a study on the power and mystery that light can create.

our son, logan, was born on march 2, 2006. it was then that i was finally able to lift most of these feelings of worry that had occupied me for so long. other things to think about from that day forward. what a blessing that little guy , and the arrival of his sister aurora a couple years later, have been.

and they have supplied plenty of stuff for mr to make art about.