A self portrait from my freshman year in College.

I went to college in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts, and got my degree in painting and drawing.

These paintings were completed during my Sophomore and Junior Years of College. I was learning a lot about the foundations behind creating a successful painting.

College was an eye opener for me and taught me so much about what I wanted to do as an artist and how I could create it. There were some bumps in the road, and I wish some of the more practical tools we need to actually make a career out of art were taught, but creatively it was a priceless experience that would have taken me much longer to learn on my own.

This photo was taken during my Junior year in my studio at UArts.

During my college years I really explored my style and the mediums I like to use. As a teenager I was drawn to really representational portraits. I wanted to paint people and capture their personalities and lives like I’d seen in the art history books through artists like Sargent, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, Mary Cassat, and etc. As I progressed through school I saw that there were a lot of different ways to paint a portrait, and I learned how they could look if you expanded your materials past just oils.

In my first semester of senior year I stopped using oils and transitioned to fluid acrylics on paper. I loved how the fluid acrylics could be used similar to watercolors but get levels of opaqueness that resembled acrylics. I also experimented with line work. I wanted to play with the positive and negative space both in and around the figure, and I liked the contrast between black and white and color in the same piece.

I continued to paint people during this time, but I started to think about the internal life of the subject and the view that was projected to the outside world. Even though I don’t paint as many people as I used to, I think that introspection and the idea of having hidden beauty is connected between humans and the landscape. My cityscapes are portraits in their own ways. Each house, although it might have many of the same qualities as other houses and buildings, is unique in its own way, and we can see that if we just take the time to look.