For as long as I can recall I’ve been fascinated by why things look the way they do.  After a designer has built functionality into a project, where does the form come from?  If an image is really worth a thousand words, what visual languages and dialects do designers and artists use as they move an idea from the ethereal into the real world?  How is it that culture-specific design languages and dialects can be universal enough to be vaguely understood the world over?

         I began my quest in the usual way, earning a bachelor’s degree in graphic design (Iowa State University, 1984) and then working in the field of commercial graphics.  After office hours I became involved in the genesis of GLBT publishing in the Twin Cities by working with the early Pride Guilds creating collateral material for the first Pride celebrations.  I also helped a local GLBT publication, Gaze, change its format from newspaper to magazine before being purchased by Lavender Media Inc. three years later.

        Somewhere along the way I began to realize that working in the field of commercial graphic art was no longer pushing my creative buttons.   To my great good fortune, several trips I made to Midwest turn-of-the-century commercial centers opened a new chapter in my creative life.   On my travels to places such as Kansas City, Omaha, Chicago, and Pittsburgh I saw vibrant architectural history in buildings (and entire blocks) that had been designed with a unity of artistic purpose that had for the most part been abandoned before the Great Depression.
          Architecture of this genre had been practiced all over the country of course, but in larger cities many examples of turn-of-the-20th-century architecture were demolished during the country’s headlong postwar rush to the future.  Parking lots and International style supplanted architectural treasures under the guise of “urban renewal.”  Irreplaceable examples of hand-hewn textures and workmanship in stone, wood, brick, stained glass, and terracotta were replaced by vast expanses of faceless, uniplanar glass curtain walls.
          I began to believe that a good bit of today’s graphic arts work, the work I was earning my living creating, has a lot in common with reckless urban renewal.  In general, commercial graphic art is designed to deliver a message quickly and inexpensively, to have a short lifespan, and then to be unflinchingly replaced.  It is often specifically designed to be unmemorable in order to allow lightning-fast, market-driven message changes.  It is art that is intended to be seen, to be replaced, and to be forgotten.
          During the belle époque, however, buildings and cities were designed on a more human (and humane) scale.  Lavish public spaces and urban vistas were the norm, not the exception, and it was a matter of civic and business pride that even the most mundane retail store pulled its weight by operating from a handsome building.  The same was true of urban residential buildings; it is not at all difficult to find beautiful 80-100 year old homes and apartment buildings in the central city corridors of many Midwestern cities.
          It became clear to me that I could use my own artistic abilities as a form of historic preservation.  The textural nuances found in century-old buildings became the basis of my on-going Urban Slice series. Small features of residential and commercial buildings and commercial signage formulate the oil paintings’ compositions. As I paint I try to bring out the very essence of a city by combining its architecture with its ambiance. My images are conceived from my reactions to the environment. The light cast upon a sign, the shapes formed by intersecting architectural planes, or perhaps an important icon to the community— these are the everyday vistas that I use as the basis of my work.  Each of my compositions reveals a kind of visual perfection, one that is no longer easily found in two adjacent buildings, let alone in an entire city block. Architecture creates landscape of all dimensions for me;  I use the past to comment on the contemporary.
          Using Urban Slice as my starting point, I have gone forward with a new series, Urban Extracts.  “Extracts” takes the visual metaphor one step further, pushing it to a point of near-abstraction.  The viewer sees an image that is obviously architecturally-derived, but cannot pinpoint exactly what the image is derived from.  A heightened natural color palette and an extremely structured composition together create a new and unique ambiance.
          I have also produced two other series of paintings, one that celebrates the fine art aspects of hand-painted lettering and commercial signage and another series of wider-angle views of historic and iconic buildings.
          My work may be seen in Minneapolis at Dean Gallery, in Pittsburgh at Eclectic Art & Objects Gallery and in Madison, WI (my hometown) at Milward Farrell Fine Art.  Besides these traditional galleries, my work hangs in the annual various shows mounted by the Northrup King Building as well as other art shows and fairs.   Thank you for your visit here!