I always knew I wanted to be an artist, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I went to Virginia Commonwealth University and got a BFA in illustration but when I got out of school I realized two things, I wasn’t good enough yet and I had no clue what to do. I then stumbled across the fact that Trader Joe’s grocery stores hired artists and then settled into working for them for almost 15 years. I was doing everything from huge murals to shelf signs. It was a good job and was wonderful place for me to experiment and develop my skills, speed and professionalism, but I always dreamed of my work being in galleries.
Somewhere along the way, I became interested in the idea of making images that looked as though they had been ripped from a story book, the idea being that the characters would seem to be a part of an ongoing narrative, and that people would have to interpret their own story. I thought it would be pretty interesting to put together a whole collection of images along this same theme, that come together to form one narrative.
