If there’s a pearl buried in the soul of Americana, maybe I’ll find it one day. In the meantime, I poach photos of second-hand beauty and disheveled panoramas. I embellish my shots with original illustrations and spray-painted stencils and immortalize them in a hand-made frame. Then I step back and toast the runners-up because they are where the pearl is truly buried.

I create my pieces using original photography I’ve taken from my travels across the north woods and American plains, the south, southwest and Latin America. I create digital montages of my original photography and embellish them with original spray-painted stencils and marker, airbrush and charcoal-pencil illustrations. 

I apply the final montage onto an archival art board, coat it with acrylic gel medium and mount it into a handmade floating frame with an airbrushed background. The result is a vibrant, layered work, soaked in color and graffitied with graphic images of iconic Americana and beyond.

I graduated from Minneapolis Technical Institute with a degree in Commercial Art, Illustration and Photography. I have a 35-year history in graphic design and image building in the best of Minneapolis’ graphic design shops and advertising agencies. The bedrock of my career began in old-school, pre-digital printing. My first job was stacking boxes and sweeping the floor in a print shop where a man still ran a letterpress printer in the back.

I spent several years backpacking through Mexico, Central and South America and the Middle East, northern Africa and Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. I worked as an EMT on an ambulance team for the Honduran Red Cross and guided whitewater river trips in the Honduran mountains. I brought back photos and a deep inspiration for color, texture and culture.