I generally believe the art should come before the artist, but you chose to click through.

At the risk of repeating myself, I am complicated but fairly simple. I grew up in Oklahoma, where football was the main religion and I was a militant atheist.

My teens and twenties were spent running away from myself while keeping a foot in many different worlds (without belonging to any of them). I was a weirdo from the start; “white” but not really, defensively “straight” but actually queer as fuck, lost but refusing directions from anyone, and determined that I knew everything better than anyone else. Gifted and talented turned out to be another name for ADHD with a side of crippling depression. Reckless hedonism and freelance pharmaceuticals became my best friends for many years.

I bounced around for most of the 90s, business to business, job to job, subculture to subculture. Some of it was creative, some of it was survival, none of it was good for me. I traded little bits of my soul for paychecks and tried to bury the pain and guilt in chemicals. In 1999, I found my way to sobriety. Positive change took a bit longer but sober was a good start.

While I navigating recovery, I reconnected with art and creativity in fits and starts over the next two decades. It has taken much longer than I like to admit but I’m finally getting back to a life focused on creation and doing good things. Sure, it took almost dying in 2025 and being left with no possibility of returning to my old life or vocation to get me here, but I’m here.

Now I spend my days drawing, painting, thinking, napping (often involuntarily), writing, and forgetting why I’m standing in the kitchen holding a paintbrush and an empty to-go container. I try to stay up to date with parts of my old life but I’m regularly reminded that I can’t do the things I used to, at least not in any meaningful way. I can still build strategies, see patterns and connections, and find solutions to big problems but what used to take hours or days now takes weeks or months. So, instead of chasing ghosts, I take the emotions, thoughts, beauty, and horror from my head and pour it out onto canvas, paper, wood, and whatever other medium strikes my fancy.

For the artists and aficionados reading, you’re likely more interested in my style and influences than my biography. I’m a poorly trained, rule-ignoring, anti-authority abstract expressionist, ish. I make art that means something to me. If others like it, great! If not, great! As much as I would love to sell some of my work, I make it for me and those around me, not for a bland art market to commoditize. I won’t say the same of the digital graphics and typography you’ll find in my online shop. That is all about making a buck where I can; we live under late stage capitalism, after all.

My influences are many and varied. It all starts with my grandmother, who painted outdoor and wildlife oils, and the geometry and colors from my Osage roots. The journey gets weird from there, from 80s heavy metal tropes to 90s gothic expansion to the explosion of pop art in the 2000s and beyond. Deep down, the artists who have influenced how I find inspiration include Seurat, Klimt, Goya, Van Gogh, Pollock, Dali, Tom of Finland, Olivia, Nagel, and Warhol, to name a few. Lately, I’ve been learning more about Anselm Kiefer, whose bleak wastelandscapes scratch a fundamental itch for me.