Contact
For prices, questions or to schedule a studio visit : email me at paintings@modino.com
Biography
“The author has chosen the messages carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
My work is an investigation into how nature survives in an urban environment, how we survive in a natural environment filtered through typography, graffiti, cartoons and abstract markings. I look for clues or a point of access from the constant bombardment of “information” and explore how that translates to the simplest shapes and forms. The paintings contain several layers, maybe several paintings. I do not paint from real life, but from my memory of objects, plants, shapes and light, informed with the emotion and setting in which I first experienced them.
As a kid growing up in the 70’s I was very influenced by my mother’s decorating style. We had an Asian room which had Chinese and Japanese paintings and sculptures and Korean art which my father shipped back to the states when he was in the Korean war. What interests me is asian art filtered though middle class Italian-American culture.
I moved to the Lower East Side in New York City in the early 1980s. There were a lot of galleries in the East Village at that time, a lot of people making art, and a lot of DIY art shows in abandoned buildings and underground clubs. Everyone did pretty much what they wanted. Wealthy white people came downtown to hang out with black, gay, and Puerto Rican artists. For a few years the scene was vibrant and exciting beyond belief. My ideas about art were dramatically influenced by that era.
I started painting on plywood because I could get it for free from my job as a carpenter. I never liked painting on canvas, I didn’t like the texture or the artistic baggage. I used house paints because they were cheaper than artists’ paints. I appreciated what that inferred, but I also liked the way they looked. I was re-using the plywood by sanding off the paint. It reminded me of the visual language and cultural history of my neighborhood, the Lower East Side. Specifically the painted wooden signs above the stores made up of layers of paint worn away and newer signs painted over the old.
I stopped painting in the early 1990s when I discovered computer graphics. I founded a graphic design company with a friend and specialized in motion graphics, video, animation and web design. In the following decade I started employing photographs of graffiti, plants, brush strokes and textures from walls and garbage dumpsters in my digital work. I used these photos as part of a painting, combining them in a way that I hoped transcended their origin. Work made from these photographs sometimes came out looking like an abstract painting, sometimes like an ancient iridescent Persian rug.
With 25 years of experience working in commercial media, it was important to me that my paintings retain something of my digital work when I returned to using wood and paint instead of pixels in 2015.
My new work is still influenced by digital image manipulation and the process of creating an image through layers. I sand the surface smooth and finish the paintings with linseed oil and then wax. I don’t think of them as paintings. I think of them as highly crafted objects, sometimes holding the illusion of depth.