So when it came time for college, the visual arts were a natural choice. I attended the Art Institute of Pittsburgh majoring in visual communications, which is just a fancy way of saying commercial illustration and advertising. As much as I learned there, the high point had to be a special effects make-up class I took that was taught by Tom Savini. He’s a hoot! After college I moved to Los Angeles with a friend of mine, happy to leave the east coast and its sometimes brutal weather for the sunny skies of California. I lived in L.A. for a year and worked for a small movie studio, FULL MOON EVTERTAINMENT, makers of such classics as PUPPET MASTER and BEACJ BABES FROM BEYOND. There I got to work as both a storyboard artist and work in the visual effects department, as a sculpter and painter. Within a year, my old college roommates from Pittsburgh moved to San Francisco and invited me to join them. So I did what any 22 year old with ADD would do and dropped everything and moved to Northern California. Our apartment was on Haight St. but not near the famous part. It was a great place to be, with a coffee shop one block away and all of our friends were musicians. Although I have always been musically inclined, I found myself getting into more varied musical scenes in that town. I began drawing flyers and posters for friend’s bands, soon clubs had me doing work for them and a crazy art career was born. One of my long term jobs in San Francisco (aside from working in too many bars there) was for a magazine that covered the swing music revival of the mid-nineties. From movies like The Mask and Swingers, kids were jumpin, jiving and wailin' all over the country. Working for Swing Time Magazine meant we got invited to go all over the country to see new bands, visit new clubs and see the biggest shows that were popping up all over. After leaving the magazine I worked a few random design jobs until ending up in the dot-com industry. I did mostly Flash animations and page layouts but it was a great way to get in on the ground floor of the booming internet industry and I was learning all the new technologies along the way. I decided to move back to Los Angeles and began freelancing steadily. One of my biggest clients was an L.A. club so most of my work continued to be with different kinds of music. I started working with a variety of clubs doing flyers and designing websites. It seems like my work has always been associated with music in one way or another. And that’s fine with me. Like they say, the beat goes on. So after working with a range of clients from the nightclub scene to the video game industry back to film and then even back to the dot-com world, I could hear the beat change once again and, in 2008, moved back to my home away from home, San Francisco. I'm happy to return to the Bay area after a seven year stint in SoCal, having learned a great deal about my craft and myself in the process. Like a good song, the beats and measures can often change. I believe it's important to not only hear it's rhythm, but, more importantly, to listen to it. It's the rhythm of life! |
I was born and raised in western New York State, just outside of Buffalo, in a small suburb that was crime free. A place where not much happened, except the local high school football game or the county fair. It was a great place to be a kid, where you could ride your bike in the summer sun or dig a snow fort in the winter’s cold. I always had a wild imagination and as soon as I got my first box of crayons, I began drawing everything from Fred Flintstone to Star Wars.