I grew up in Nashville, TN, in the '70s and '80s as a typical middle-class kid who watched way too much TV. My first artistic endeavors were drawing on the walls of my closet with a purple crayon, copying characters from the funny pages, and rendering all four members of Kiss. In high school, some kids brought a R. Crumb comic book to school. Crumb's art had a huge impact on me and inspired me to become a cartoonist. I spent my twenties creating comics and trying to get them published (with little success). As I look back, drawing countless comic strips and teaching myself to draw was the best training I could have had. Self-training enabled me to develop a unique style filled with peculiar relationships between scale and proportion mixed with an odd sense of perspective. By the time I finally got around to going to college, I had a pretty clear vision of what I wanted my art to be. Fortunately, I found a printmaking professor who liked what I was doing (or didn't mind as much as the other professors) and allowed me to make the art floating around in my head.

 

After college, a myriad of low-paying, dead-end jobs, and limited prospects in the cartooning business, I picked up a paintbrush and began to paint in 1998. My paintings are an extension of what I did as a cartoonist, though not quite with the same linear narrative as comic strips. Again, through self-training and trial and error, my paintings have evolved into distinctive art.