AND THE WORK CONTINUES...
In the latter half of 2025, the curator of the Art Association of Harrisburg approached me about having a solo exhibition in early 2026. Mid-2023 was the last time the full body of my work had been exhibited, and much had changed since then. Four additional major works had been created, and I experienced the death of my partner. Additionally, the timing of the exhibit neatly coincided with a decade of work since graduate school. It seemed the perfect opportunity to reflect through the lens of an exhibition. (Below are the four additional works completed since 2023.)
So I said yes to the opportunity, and from April 10, 2026, to May 14, 2026, the Art Association of Harrisburg hosted a solo exhibition of 19 of my pieces in their main gallery. With only two exceptions, every work displayed had been created within the past decade.
The first exception was the painting below, entitled Immortal Home. It was completed within a few months of returning from a two-week trip to Italy with six friends during the summer of 2001. The evening our group landed in Italy and settled into our rented villa, we set out on a post-dinner exploratory walk to get the lay of the locale. This home sits just off the square in the small town of Bastia near Padua, Italy. It is the ancestral home of a local shopkeeper whom our group befriended. To me, it carried a significance that far exceeded that evening walk.
Our group spent the next week exploring northern Italy — Milan, Venice, and Verona. While I joined them on those excursions, I continually returned to this house. Two days of my travel choices were spent sitting in front of this magnificent structure, sketching and creating watercolor studies. None of the necessary art materials had been brought with me, but they were gladly acquired.
One of the things I adore most about creative expression is that, like an impulsive and insistent lover, it will not be denied. For me, this has also been life’s purest relationship. There has never been post-coital shame from breaking societal norms, only an incomparable and life-altering afterglow.
When I departed for Italy, I left a half-completed painting on my easel. Upon my return, it was quickly discarded, and a new canvas was acquired in the intuitively desired measurements of 40” x 30”. While my educational focus had always been art, I had never subjected myself painting lessons and remain a self-taught painter. For reasons I cannot fully explain, painting has always been sacred territory.
While I had dabbled in previous periods, Immortal Home was the third painting I took seriously enough to create with pure intent. It was the first painting where, upon completion, I knew myself to be an artist. No instructor demonstrated how to create a believable atmosphere. My lover showed me how. No teacher explained how to capture the viewer with an essence greater than the painting’s individual parts. My lover did that.
Formally, the painting is arguably crude and likely juvenile. But I love its innocent optimism and boundless hope. It is unashamed and timeless. Every time I paint, part of me is trying to return to that place — return to my love.
Many works followed Immortal Home. All were documented, though few survived a later purge. Looking back, it was on the strength of Immortal Home that I decided to finish my education.
The following year, I enrolled in Drake University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program. I focused on drawing, because drawing is to art what mathematics is to science: the basis of all disciplines. It was a significant challenge returning to both art and academia at the age of 34. With one exception, all of my classmates were fresh out of high school. Each circumstance carried its own advantages and disadvantages.
In the spring of 2005, I earned my BFA from Drake University. After graduation, I entered the non-art workforce but continued creating in my spare time. There were successful creations and there were less successful ones. The important thing was that the work continued.
In the spring of 2010, Westminster Presbyterian Church in Des Moines, Iowa, hosted an art exhibition and invited ten local artists to participate. Their sanctuary is rectangular in shape, with a large east-facing rose window behind the pulpit and above the pipe organ. The north and south walls are adorned with stained-glass windows positioned between the ribs of the vaulted ceiling. The spaces between the windows and beneath the ribs measure roughly 20’ x 5’. The exhibit curator saw these areas as ideal platforms for an annual invitational exhibition.
The curator provided the theme and the stretched canvases. I accepted the invitation and requested a canvas with the dimensions of 60” x 48” for the piece I envisioned.
This would become my largest canvas to date and the first in a long line of spiritually driven narrative works. It was also the first piece in a body of work that would evolve into The Magnificent Ones. The painting was titled Ancient & Always. Through it, I explored questions surrounding divinity, humanity, identity, free will, and the relationship between them. Though the Bristlecone Pine served as the subject, Ancient & Always was derived almost entirely from imagination. It was enormously important to me and marked another high-water point in my catalog.
Work continued, and in the fall of 2012, I enrolled in Iowa State University’s Master of Fine Arts program. My experience of the contemporary MFA program was that, overtly, it was designed to prepare students for professional careers in academic art. However, its deeper purpose was to remake the creative maker.
What I experienced was a systematic three-year “breakdown to rebuild” process. During the first year, professors observed what you created, how you approached it, and why. The second year dismantled the familiar and pushed students into the unknown, forcing profound inner questioning. The third year involved reassembling creative expression in order to complete the cycle of transformation. I can summarize my graduate education in two words: “Consider Everything.”
My time at ISU remains my favorite period of adult life. Art was the only focus. There was nothing else. No external pressures required compromise, and the work created there reflected that freedom. While I experienced my share of brutal academic critiques, it was also a period where boundaries dissolved. Experimentation and exploration were not merely encouraged; they were expected.
In 2015, I graduated and emerged a different artist. Iowa — and much of the Midwest generally — do not value the kind of culture toward which my work points. So I moved back to south-central Pennsylvania, where I had lived from 1992 to 2002. And the work continued.
The early focus of my return to Pennsylvania centered on portrait busts. Much of this direction originated in my graduate thesis work, though the emphasis had shifted toward reflecting our relationship with pop culture. Busts of Martin Luther King Jr., Jeff Buckley, Chewbacca and George Harrison, Aretha Franklin, the now-infamous Buddha ‘Ye (which earned me a much-coveted internet death threat), and David Bowie emerged in quick succession.
The paintings changed as well. When I returned to large formats, an abstract entitled Shiva’s Dance was the first to emerge. It was unlike anything that had come before. Four additional large-format paintings exploded forth, beginning with The Burning of Notre Dame and culminating in The Devil, The Doctor, The Deliverer.
Then another moment shifted the paradigm and altered life again.
On October 25, 2023, Christopher, my boyfriend of seven years, intentionally left life. More than any singular event before it, his death forced an examination of all and ultimately distilled itself into one profoundly simple question: “What am I afraid of?”
I was working on a painting the night he died. Though I did not know it at the time, we were texting while he overdosed. The painting remained untouched as I grieved, and it took nearly a year to process both the loss and the significance of the work itself. What had begun as an optimistic ocean seascape could no longer be completed as originally intended because I no longer viewed life through the same lens. In many ways, the unfinished painting became a reflection of that rupture — the moment when both the work and the person creating it fundamentally changed. This painting became the final piece in The Magnificent Ones collection.
So I put my “Big Boy Pants” on and set up the exhibit. The night of the opening reception as I looked across the gallery walls in the Art Association of Harrisburg, I began to recognize something I had not fully understood before. Every phase of my life — Italy, graduate school, The Magnificent Ones, the years of experimentation, even grief — had changed the form of the work, but never the reason for making it. The same lover that first revealed itself through Immortal Home was still present.
Sometimes that relationship manifested through wonder. Sometimes through ambition, spirituality, reinvention, or pain. But it remained constant even when I did not. The work evolved because I evolved, and the exhibition became a visual record of those transformations.
In the aftermath of Christopher’s death, I kept asking the same question: “What am I afraid of?” At first, the answers seemed obvious. I feared criticism, rejection, misunderstanding, or failure. I had kept The Magnificent Ones private because I understood that the work was not simply visual — it was vulnerable. To exhibit it publicly meant revealing parts of myself I was not certain I was prepared to defend.
But grief has a way of stripping away performance and forcing honesty. After surviving something infinitely more devastating than artistic rejection, I began to understand that withholding the work was its own form of death. Silence had become safer than living.
Ten years after graduate school, I no longer believe artistic growth comes from mastering a techniques, a fixed identity or artistic style. The most important moments occurred when certainty collapsed and something unfamiliar emerged in its place. Looking back now, I understand that beneath all the artistic theories, academic transformations, and evolving aesthetics, the deepest fear was much simpler.
I was afraid to live openly through the work itself.
Standing in that gallery, surrounded by a decade of work, I realized the exhibition was not about arriving anywhere. It was about continuing the conversation. And perhaps that is what the exhibition ultimately marked: the moment I stopped hiding from my own life. And the work continues…
Below is a video of the exhibition and the evening reception. Enjoy!
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