My Story 

 

I began my art career straight out of high school—after being catapulted from the nest and totally on my own— by obtaining a job in the design department of a personalized greeting card company, Grant Publishing, in Chicago. My credentials?  The ability to draw.  University came later.  Prior, as a high school student, I worked at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Young Artists Studio program office on Saturdays and during summers. I did whatever odd jobs were needed, like being a drawing model or hanging student shows, in exchange for free art classes plus access to a world class museum. This was well worth the long and lumbering early morning train commute from the cultural dessert where I lived.  There, my high school resided, literally, in the shadow of an oil refinery. Due to overcrowding, I was required to attend classes during the 2nd evening shift which meant limited access to an already limited art curriculum.

 

I grew up in ethnically diverse blue-collar neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, but my own origins are rather generic.  Being of Canadian-English and Swiss-French decent several generations removed from immigration, my family was barely aware of our heritage, and, the holidays we celebrated as well as the food we ate were thoroughly  Americanized.  Canned vegetables and Jello desserts were the order of the day.  However, I did have plenty of unique color in my upbringing.  The nearby and nearly defunct Chicago Stockyards managed by my grandfather was my private playground.  Though my parents were not particularly religious, I attended an old dilapidated Catholic school (à la The Blues Brothers) where a culture of humiliation prevailed and daily mass was mandatory.  We often prayed for our building which was periodically condemned.  Most notably, my parents were, well, crazy.  My father, educated at IIT, was an engineer and brilliant draftsman but clinically schizophrenic which made him prone to hallucinations, like communicating with Martians, and violent “nervous breakdowns” that led to electroshock therapy and unemployment.  My mother, who unfortunately had to drop out of high school to have me at sixteen, was a self-avowed misanthrope suffering from agoraphobia (extreme fear of public spaces) and its panic attacks. My mom was a naturally talented artist. She also had considerable knowledge of native plants which she pilfered from forest preserves and cultivated in our back yard. This included water lilies that she supplied to area nurseries.  Further, both TV and stereo were banished  from our house in my mom’s obsessive attempt to turn our mid-century modern style home into a kitschy palace of yesteryear.  All this could be difficult and at times, but I also came to relish our craziness and see our absurd way of life as perhaps superior to the status quo. After all, I could bring Pepsi to school in my Barbie lunchbox thermos. To this end, art was (and still is) both a means of escape and control for me.  It allowed my Libra brain to keep one foot firmly in the rational world while giving me a means to transcend adversity.

 

In spite of today’s identity driven ‘selfie’ culture, I feel less than celebratory about my own background.  My story remains less the subject of and more the reason I make art.  However, my past did give me independence and resourcefulness which led to my unique perspective and approach to art. I did not follow the trajectory of a typical fine arts education and its pipeline to success feeding into the cult of youth and next new thing.  Rather, I went to school later (mom tore up my scholarship to study art at Lake Forest Academy) and my school choice was based on affordability vs prestige. I majored in geology as an undergrad.  I did not formally study fine art until after I received my masters in art history.  

 

I suspect that my work would be more rigorously consistent and conceptually driven if my art education followed a more conventionally academic track.  Instead, I am prone to strike out on quirky divergent paths of exploration and I find visual ideas to be more interesting than theoretical scaffolding.  I Like the idea of “slow art” and pay fond attention to detail and craft.  I am drawn to the small geometric paintings of Tomma Abts and the decoratively detailed collage works of Fred Thomaselli because, emotionally, I connect with how their work feels both sophisticated and of the moment as well as naive at the same time.  (For Abts, her small but very contemporary abstract paintings involve tedious reworking and a retro color palette that I relate to.  Thomaselli’s collaged based works point to current drug culture while his style is reminiscent of folk art and evokes throwback ideas of transcendence which also interests me.) My own work is a result of inhabiting a position of both “sophistication” and “naivety”.  That is, I have advanced education at my disposal but at the same time I remain tethered to a gritty and unsophisticated past.  My story is about surpassing limits and crossing boundaries.  I may not be what I seem.