My Artwork
Paper collages and collage boxes
My son was born in New York City in October of 1996. I didn't want to be off traveling the world without him. I wanted to stay home and be a father. His preschool was 3 blocks from the World Trade Center. I used to go to the bookstore there and read children's books to him. One day a truck filled with bombs exploded in the underground parking lot. I stopped going there after that. This was a warning of things to come, as in the day they flew planes into the Twin Towers and took them down.
Since I wanted to stay home and watch over him, I rented a piano and started studying drawing at Cooper Union. I had always wanted to be an artist, but music had taken over my life.
My inspirations were Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell. I started selling a lot of art, but the 2008 money market crash slowed things down. It didn't slow down my creating art, just my ambition to sell it.
My process is identical to my songwriting. I gather loose ends and piece them together until it feels like some coherent statement has been made, except with songs it is chords, rhythms, and lyrics, and with art it is images and objects.
I've had considerable construction experience in my life, and I've made many frames from cement block pallets and made the boxes for my collage boxes from construction dumpsters and roadside wood finds.
The themes in my songs and visual art are identical, New York, Catholic schoolboy conversations with the divine, and the matters regarding the feminine.
At some point, I would like to do shows where I perform my music and show my art. I had my first show like that, scheduled in Germany in 2020, but Covid came along and derailed many plans I had made.