My work disrupts the familiar.
I take portraits and break them apart—layering, distorting, and rebuilding until something else shows up.
What I’m after is what’s not immediately visible. The tension, the fracture, the parts we don’t usually see in ourselves.
I’m not trying to make something polished.
I’m interested in imperfection—in the wabi-sabi sense of it. The idea that what’s incomplete or unresolved is often more honest.
Process
I work with an iPhone and my hands.
I shoot the original portrait. Or work from images shared with me. Either way, the starting point is just that—a starting point.
I break the image down—physically and digitally. Crumpling, folding, layering textures and fragments that don’t belong together. Over time, the image shifts into something new.
I don’t use AI. Everything is constructed by hand.
The final work sits somewhere between photography, painting, and collage. It’s still a portrait, but it doesn’t behave like one.
My story
I didn’t set out to become an artist.
On February 11, 2004, I was sitting in the Seattle Art Museum watching Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet—four seemingly unrelated videos stitched together into something strange,, chaotic, and perfectly synchronized.
It changed something for me.
At the time, I was a partner at a design firm. I was successful by most conventional measures, but increasingly aware that I wasn’t particularly interested in the life I had worked so hard to build. I left the firm and started trying to figure out what came next.
Art became part of that figuring out.
Over the years, it took a lot of forms. I wrote a novel about a clueless life coach who uses his grandfather’s ashes to help people find their spirit animals. I made podcasts. I performed a one-man comedy show. I made things that worked and a lot that didn’t.
Eventually I found my way to photography, digital manipulation, paint, and mixed media. I like combining things that weren’t intended to go together—images, textures, marks, accidents—and seeing what happens.
The work keeps changing, which is important to me. I’m less interested in developing a recognizable style than I am in staying curious and making work that surprises me.
If it surprises someone else too, even better.