1. Artist Statement

2. Artist Bio

3. Portfolio

4. In-Depth Look

ARTIST BIO

I am a TV personality, environmentalist, and best-selling author based in Seoul, South Korea. Originally born and raised between the Taconics and the Green Mountains of the northeast United States, I have always felt a strong emotional and existential connection to nature. In my art, I explore that connection as a way of overcoming my own emotional and psychological limits and coping with the loss that I feel in city life.

I have spent the majority of my professional life in educational media, entertainment, and the public sector. As such, I am not an artist by trade nor have I had a formal education in the field any more than any other student would in primary and secondary school. But honestly, I don’t really care about that. For me, making something isn’t for other people. It’s a form of self love and is only for me. I have always felt that way. Since I was little, I would draw or paint because it was fun and made me feel good. As I grew older, that habit stayed with me and became an outlet to refresh and acknowledge myself. Art is still just for me and I will continue to take that with me throughout the rest of my life.

In terms of media, I tend to paint with acrylics. As tools, I use anything I want to play around with. Sometimes I will apply paint to the canvas using tape, leftover plastic packaging, rags, pencil butts, broken pieces of wood, shoe buffers, and more. I also combine random objects to make new tools for application.

Acrylic on Canvas

Click on any of the following pieces to see an in-depth description of the process behind creating the painting; the idea behind it, how it was planned, and the technique or intention behind each stroke.

Hippopotami (hippopotamus amphibius) play an integral role in sub-saharan ecosystems. They live both in still and moving bodies of water ranging from rivers to lakes and swamps. They spend the day resting and cooling off in groups in the water and then move onto the land at night to graze. As they eat the low-lying grasses, fallen fruit, and other nearby flora, they absorb nitrogen and phosphorous into their bodies. Those nutrients are then later transferred into the water as they relieve themselves. This is why the hippo is called a “cross-boundary species”, because it lives in both terrestrial and aquatic habitats but also links them through eutrophication. Without the hippo, aquatic ecosystems would suffer and so would, in turn, surrounding ecosystems. For this reason, hippos should viewed with reverence. They are a key, integral species and one of the most important eco-architects on the African continent.

How could we portray hippos from above when they are in the water? While they graze alone on land, they are always in groups in the water. Usually, these groups are made up of 10 to 30 individuals, mostly females with one dominant male. From above, they group together with their young in the middle. While the whole group is usually oriented in a general direction (a grain, so to speak), each individual is facing their own way. From above, the body of the hippo may not be visible as it may be entirely below the surface. When hippos break the surface it is usually in the order of nose-eyes/ears-neck-back. Sometimes they will sit at the surface with just their faces above the waterline, sometimes their whole head and spine. When a hippo goes underwater it will, again, leading with its head, go below the surface and sometimes may just expose its back to the air. However, in general, the most common position is head, neck, and back all slightly above the waterline. This makes their outline almost look like ants because the three main body parts have a similar proportion to head-body-thorax when viewed from above. Hippos’ bodies have very unique functions. Given that they spend the majority of their lives under the hot sun, their skin and body temperatures must be regulated constantly. By staying in the water, they can more easily keep their body temperatures low. They also sweat continuously. This sweat also helps protect their skin from sun damage, much like a natural sunscreen. The color has a pink tinge. This is why some people say that hippos “sweat blood” (it’s not actually blood). It’s also another reason why we often think of hippos as pink, when the majority of their bodies are really a darker, purple tone.

Water always has movement to it, whether “still” or not. This movement is both affected by- and helps to determine- the movement of whatever is in the water. In other words, hippos both as individuals and as a group have a mutually influential relationship with the structure of water systems. Hippos help craft the body of water through nutrient transfer and they also benefit from the further development of that body of water. Placement, therefore, needs to reflect this type of relationship.

In order to portray depth and movement of water, layering is necessary. Land, sediment, currents, and depths must be expressed and hippos must be placed appropriately in this matrix.

Current and flow occur in multiple dimensions. It is not just at the surface, but also woven up and and down in columns. When viewed from above, this could be well expressed through the use of various tones and interwoven lines.

The hippos themselves should be grouped. Their body structures should reflect they way they are most often seen in their environment. The light reflected on their bodies and their shape and texture could be well expressed by using geometric lines in various tones.

The octopus is one of the earth’s most fascinating creations. So fascinating, in fact, that it has inspired science-fiction, fantasy, political, and philosophical works. Perhaps this is because the octopus has such a unique biology and anatomy topped off with remarkably impressive intelligence. Octopuses (not octopi as the word comes from greek not latin) are cephalopods, which means head-foot animal and encompasses the squid, the cuttlefish, and the nautilus. Octopuses have eight appendages with the mouth at the center, which has a strong beak for breaking open shellfish and crustaceans. The eyes sit just above the mouth. The brain, wraps around the mouth like a doughnut. Compared to all other invertebrates, the octopus has the highest brain-to-body ratio with a highly advanced nervous system.

What many people mistake as the “head” of the octopus, the large sack-shaped part on the opposite end from the arms, is actually the octopus’s equivalent of a torso. That is where all the vital organs are located. That is why when an octopus moves, it does not lead with that part of its body but rather with what we see as the “center” of its body, the eyes. Often an octopus will sit or move on its arms, dragging its torso behind it with its eyes elevated. When the octopus moves, its arms form various different shapes both independently and as a whole.

Thanks to the octopus’s highly developed and decentralized nervous system, each arm can react independently as the octopus moves across the ocean floor. Just as we walk without thinking much about how we move our feet, the octopus can move its arms in multiple different directions, reacting independently to obstacles and stimuli, without having to give much thought to what it is doing. In other words, the octopus is “multidexterous”, so to speak.

The octopus adapts its skin color to its surroundings for communication, play, attracting a mate, camouflage and more. The octopus will feel its way across the seabed and can taste everything it touches with the hundreds of suckers on its arms. The amount of information that the octopus will process must be of massive quantities and it is then reflected in its movement and coloration. The octopus is, essentially, reading the seabed and trying to become one with it as it hunts or hides. In a painting, therefore, there should be an overall congruence between the make-up of the octopus and its environs. The seabed should unite smoothly and naturally with the octopus and there should only be a suggestion of its presence. By using tape and then removing it, we can create a white contour of the octopus’s movement without disrupting the textures and colors that will connect the seabed as a whole.

Cliffs and rock faces expose the places we stand as not just physical locations but temporal ones as well. Rock is something we understand physically as solid, steadfast, reliable, unmoving, hard, lifeless, and cold. That is just a result of our laziness and unwillingness to understand rock on its own timeline. Sedimentary rock, formed over millennia at the bottom of oceans and forests, store the ghosts of another time, another world that was not our own. By looking into the layers, shapes, and textures of exposed rock faces, we can take a glimpse into not only the history of our planet but also learn the secrets of the past.

Sedimentary rock forms, typically, in flat lines of varying textures and thicknesses. They are compressed upon each other and seem, at first solid. But, at a closer look, one can see that there is movement. Surfaces are not always flat, as such the layers of history in these rocks is not always a straight line. Sometimes, they are even interrupted by shifts in the earth, tremors, wildfire, and hurricanes, and flash-floods. Each layer holds within it the flora and fauna of the age. It could have been an ocean floor covered with crustaceans and mollusks, armored fish, and ichthyosaurs. Another layer could be a boggy swamp or a thick forest of early trees in the Carboniferous with centipedes the size of a bus. Yet another later just a bit higher could be resting place of a sweeping plain roamed by gigantic predatory flightless birds (Phorusrhacidae). Each era has its own texture, its own identity, color, and thickness reflecting the many worlds that our earth has hosted — solid records of the most fluid thing in the universe; time.

Identity should be clear from a distance but also from up close. Each layer should be fascinating in its own way and have its own attitude. Application of the paint should include brushing, dabbing, scraping, slicing, and scarring. Paint brushes, shoe brushes, paint knives, and anything else both precise yet variable should be used. When someone gets close to the painting, each area made up of a few layers should also form its own picture. It should be like multiple paintings within one work, just like a rock face is multiple times within one exposed surface.

How do whales interpret comfort? What does “together” mean to a whale? Whales may seem lonely to us in what we perceive as the vastness of the ocean. But, some whales can whisper tens of thousands of kilometers. To a whale, being “with” someone has a whole different meaning. In order to understand a whale’s relationship with space and the emotions that follow we must first examine its anatomy. Cetaceans are usually split into one of two categories; toothed whales and baleen whales. For the purpose of exploring solitude and space we will explore the perspective of the latter. Their bodies, as descendants of land-based mammals, have a skeletal structure that results in an up and down movement as they swim. Unlike fish, which move from side to side, the whale’s spine is designed for vertical movement. The ribcage is large and, as a baleen whale, the jaw is enormous, almost equally as large as the ribcage. The eye is place slightly more forward than the blowhole. The eyes are also usually situated just at the corner of the jaw.

The ocean itself is made up of many layers of temperatures and currents. They are circular, spinning, twisting, turning, shooting, and interwoven within each other. Using different types of brush strokes, paint thickness, and application techniques (brush, acrylic pens etc.) we can express the diversity of texture, speed, and temperature of these currents.

One of the things we never think about is what lies below our feet — dirt. The word itself even has connotation of being useless, ugly, or unwanted. We give it nicer names like soil when want to use it for growing things. But, in reality it’s all just that — dirt. Dirt is one of the most important things on the planet. It has a lot organic matter and serves as the canvas on which life is painted, much like water does. Take a close look at dirt and it is full of useful nutrients, microorganisms, and fungi.

Fungi are everywhere in dirt. Their mycelium, particularly that of mycorrhizal fungi, connects entire ecosystems in a web of nutrients and information. Any piece of dirt you look at under a microscope will be home to many diverse organisms and nutrients. The painting should strive to show this fullness and diversity.

As mycelium interconnect, they form hubs. Different types of fungi are present, so different color hubs should also be present in the painting. They should interconnect and exchange nutrients between each other. Using dots, lines, and other shapes to portray nutrients, we can place these in different concentrations at both hubs and along the long, intertwined connections between them. Each hub should exist as its own entity with its own network, yet they should also be connected as a functional whole and it should be clear to the viewer that they are moving and exchanging something.

Portraying Big Rock from my perspective as child would mean mostly looking at where I would first climb up on it. A bit to the left, looking down into the waterline, watching the slow low-tide waves feed the tidal pools. Texture is key. It was a smooth rock, mostly, worn from the waves. Big Rock weathered many hurricanes. But, there were barnacles and periwinkles all over, giving it a rough spikiness here and there. There were a lot of creatures around the rock; seaweeds, jellies, man-o-wars, crabs, snails. For some reason I don’t remember seeing any gulls on the rock. Maybe it’s because I was always climbing all over it.