For decades, I made small, dark still life paintings in oil, influenced strongly by the Dutch and Spanish still life masters of the seventeenth century—even as I filled my notebooks with cartoon drawings, comics, and graphic narratives. Then, about a decade ago I became gravely ill, a consequence, it emerged, of the many years I had spent working with toxic materials in a poorly ventilated studio. Forced to surrender the materials I had relied on for my entire career, I taught myself to bring centuries-old techniques—egg tempera and brush and inks—as well as new mediums to bear on my lifelong fascination with what cartoon drawings can accomplish. My new paintings ask: What is visual art, and how do visual and symbolic markings communicate differently? How did we evolve into human beings who could communicate at all? What is our communication for? What does it mean to communicate?

     Born and raised in Texas, the son of a Southern Baptist preacher, and educated at the University of Texas and the Ohio State University, I have lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio since 1992 with my wife, the novelist Michelle Herman. Among my honors and awards are numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, a Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Fellowship, and the Ohio Arts Council Artist in Residence Fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. My work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Boston, Memphis, Tulsa, and many other cities throughout the U.S. For fifteen years, I primarily showed my work at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City. That work was an ever-evolving series of still life paintings, for which I became well known.

      Still life painting began for me, even before graduate school, as a means to learn to paint from life; it evolved into a study of the history of the genre, and over time became a fully incorporated and primary means of self-identification. For years I spent twelve to fifteen hours a day making still life paintings in oil. Then, a decade or so ago, I began to develop symptoms—dizziness, tremors, fatigue—that were at first mysterious, but were eventually diagnosed as the result of long-term exposure to the solvents that had been at the center of my practice. These symptoms interfered with and eventually prevented me from working in the studio at all.

      The irony—that the work that was the primary force in my life, and the many years and long hours I'd spent locked away in a dark studio with oil paints and mediums and varnishes, had gravely harmed me—seemed unbearable. And for a time it was impossible for me to imagine working in any other way, doing any other thing than what I had been doing for so long. But as it became clear that along with treatment and therapies to help reverse the nerve damage, I should not risk further exposure, I set out to find new materials to use, new ways to work, new projects to undertake. It's hard to overstate how daunting that seemed.
     But it has not remained daunting. Eventually I learned to use egg tempera, and to devote most of my studio time to what had always been a pastime for me—the drawing of cartoons. New painterly types of ideas began to emerge: white ink as a correction fluid; the erasure of words and "mistakes" as a prominent feature; reflections on communication in different forms; words as symbols as pictures. And it began to become clear to me that I was coming at the same problems I had approached with oils but from a different direction.

Pages of a book, paintings on a wall—a familiar presentation, twisted and blended, the edges between the two blurred, so that the familiar becomes strange and surprising.
      My  new work incorporates multiple art forms (cartoons, comix, painting, scientific illustration, illuminated manuscripts), multiple mediums (pencil, ink, shellac, egg tempera, enamel, water miscible oils), and multiple conceptual frameworks that allow me to explore a multiplicity of ideas (political, philosophical, cultural, etc.) from multiple points of view. It issues an invitation to interpretation through learned methodologies as well as a hindrance to easy interpretation that encourages a new way of looking at visual art. The paintings themselves both look “like paintings” and like the original artwork for a comic book as well as images from art history (as if reproduced from a textbook) and scientific illustrations of plant and animal life; each painting is also a page in a book itself—and there will be a book (which will invite the question: is this a comic book? An exhibition catalogue?). Challenges to the artist’s/author’s authority are not only welcome but encouraged; meaning is mysterious and often obfuscated (sometimes literally, as when words are erased or covered over or blend into one another). The paintings themselves are begun in the traditional method of glue/chalk gesso on wood panel, and the framework for the 2-D work to come is the comics panel; within that framework, as elements from painting, illustration, comics, comix, cartoons, illuminated manuscripts, and other artifacts are added and juxtaposed, so are the various mediums associated with those art forms.