About me
Hello! I’m a handsome painter currently located in Bloomington, Indiana. I’m here on a detour of life, and I’d like to figure out whether or not I have a midwestern spirit. My roommate, Sue, does not. She is a shih tzu. She’s always had eastern sensibilities. I appreciate that about her.
In 2025 I received my M.A. in Art from Northwestern State University of Louisiana where I worked mostly with functional ceramics and acrylic painting. The medium of ceramics is something that I really enjoy and find to be helpful as a kind of relief pitcher when I’m struggling to find my next step as a painter. I love the emphasis on process, repetition, and execution that is the foundation of wheel-thrown ceramics, as well as the way that the clay and laws of physics make many of the decisions for me. It’s a good way to exercise my creative muscles without the conceptual backing that I feel I need when painting. I’d much rather make thoughtless ceramic pieces than thoughtless paintings.
There are certainly levels to ceramics, and in order to make the really top shelf stuff you need to be more architect and scientist than just artist. The ceramic pieces that define the medium and push it forward, either in concept or quality, are the result of extensive planning, practicing, experimenting, and obnoxious attention to detail. This is never how I’ve been able to engage with the medium, and because of that I don’t expect to ever make a “great” vase or “career defining” mug, and I’m okay with that.
How I got into Painting
Painting is the medium that I find is better to express my ideas and create work that feels intelligent and meaningful. I liked painting growing up and took some art classes in middle and high school, though I was by no means particularly talented.
I discovered my adult interest in painting my freshman year of college while taking a required fine arts class. The class touched on just about every medium you can imagine, so the time spent on any given subject was brief. I specifically remember learning about Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, and being wowed by how much thought and history can be woven into one painting. I think what really drew me in to it was just how much was going on in the triptych, and the amount of religious symbolism and cultural context that I would never understand because it speaks to a time 500 years before I was born.
This is still one of my favorite qualities in a painting: when the viewer can’t wholly understand what they’re looking at. I imagine it’s like a realistic take on why mind reading would never work. Even if you could read someone’s exact thoughts, it would just be a jumbled mess of short hand, references you don’t get, and inside jokes with their younger self. I love the way that people and painting are truly individuals in this way.
While taking this class I decided to try my hand at painting again, so I looked on google images for a picture of a bayou (I lived in Louisiana, very poignant). I used it as a reference for Loot Lake, a genre defining, breathtaking landscape that subverts expectations by having purple water and a title that alludes to a location on the original Fortnite map. 500 years from now a college freshman could never hope to understand what the 2017 Fortnite map meant to me and my peers. I suppose this is also how Bosch feels about the book of Genesis.
Now Loot Lake doesn’t hang in the Louvre for a couple reasons. The composition is drab, the colors are muddy, and it’s not all too conceptually dense. But that was all lost on me! I thought it was cool and it looked like a painting and I had made it. This pride I felt carried me a long way in my interest in painting and demarks when I decided I wanted to be an artist. The following couple years would be best described as pubescent, where my work went from cute and endearing, to awkward and derivative, but eventually my practice has matured a bit and now stands on its own two feet. My love of landscape painting remains. Thank you, Loot Lake, and thank you, Hieronymus Bosch!
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