As an artist, my goal has always been to convey an emotion to the viewer with the simplest means. I was trained as a portrait painter and have emulated the work of the great masters for their fluid use of paint. I prefer to paint ordinary people in public settings such as bars or cafe’s as well as on the streets or waiting for trains.

I was interested in art early on because my older brother and cousin were also artists. They apprenticed to a local fresco painter for a year and afterward started attending a French Academic Art school based out of Minneapolis named The Atelier Studio Program of Fine Art and brought me along.

Training at the Atelier began with a series of exercises starting with charcoal drawings of plaster caste busts, before progressing to more difficult things such as still life, portraiture and the human figure in Oil paint. Concurrent with these exercises was the study of life drawing with charcoal followed by Oil paint.

After completing the program I took up studying landscape painting while living in southern Argentina and became tuned into the 19th century tonalist painters George Inness and James McNeill Whistler. Their atmospheric paintings inspired me to focus on the rural landscape as a way to convey emotion to the viewer. I moved back home and continued toward that goal for several years painting the landscapes I had seen growing up around my family’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest. After several years I moved back to Minneapolis and became interested in street photography and street painting. I developed a large body of work focusing on the downtown landscapes of the Twin Cities with the aim to communicate traditional techniques with a more contemporary subject matter.

The aim of my urban paintings has been to develop candid portraits of people living in different situations and cultures with in the Twin Cities and greater Mid-West, by using geometry and composition I strive to reveal both the variety of culture and similarity in character of the people who walk the streets. I work to study and interpret individuals living out the leisure, commerce, and hectic aspects of their everyday public lives. Each painting is an attempt to tell a story and reveal the streets as a theatre for the full range of human emotions.

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Downtown, 48x36, oil on panel, $5800

Jax Cafe, 27x48, oil on panel, $3700

Walking Down the Line, 22x28" oil on panel, $2495