My Story:

I am a 70’s child who played barefoot on the street that I grew up on, and was always fascinated by nature and in love with its treasures. From the time I could scribble at about the age of three, my mother gave me pencils, markers, and crayons to draw, which she encouraged fervently, even keeping much of what I did to this day. I was also taken by clockwork mechanisms which I found around my home, but the pinnacle of this fascination came in the mid 80’s when so many classic science-fiction movies came out. To me, the ultimate was Terminator, featuring a skeletal cyborg that combined the beauty of the human skeleton with a mechanism. That is where I found the initial inspiration for my work.

I decided to become an artist when I was 21 years old. During that time, I had a bad waitressing experience in Dawson City, Yukon, suffering terrible harassment and complete disrespect from the head waitress of the restaurant I was working at. Confused and upset, I turned to nature for comfort and solace, ridge walking on the mountains nearby, and after a week of soulful contemplation, I realized I did not want to work for anyone but myself. I was determined to avoid the pitfalls and fallout of workplace politics, and this is how I finally decided to dedicate my life to art.

As an environmentalist, what I discovered after making this decision, was that I also had a unique voice to express my concerns about our human impact on the environment. My work consisted of watercolour robots featuring animals and people, which were a commentary on the effects of human interaction with the earth.  Gradually, I became concerned about our humanity in general concerning technology and wondered if we have the wisdom to act responsibly in the face of growing technological advancement.

It was an early love affair gone awry that transformed my work further, which inspired a more symbolic approach to art that allowed me to incorporate another characteristic into my work. I was now very much aware of the vagaries of our human condition. As I experienced heartbreak, despair, and a knee-jerk reaction against jealousy, I wove each aspect into various paintings. I discovered a new dimension to my work, combining technology with humanistic(s).

For all my love of mechanism, however, I don’t obsess about technological advances that much, and my sources of inspiration are now more about our shared human experience. That said, I still use a language of mechanism to express my meaning through art. I am only human and, like anyone, subject to the vicissitudes of life, and I often weave this into the content of my paintings, which are like mechanical structures meant to convey a hidden meaning. I invite you to take a closer look at my work and see if you can decipher any given work’s meaning for yourself or come up with your interpretation to match what you see.