“Redemption Beneath The Expressway”, oil on canvas, 77” x 88”, 2026

This painting deals with green painted heavy steel structures across the city like the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn, NY, one of many distinct areas of Brooklyn where I came of age.  It spanned a gritty, dangerous realm from the mouth of the Battery Tunnel to the edge of Bay Ridge, filled with Hispanic gangs, crackheads, street people and prostitutes throughout the 1980s and 90s.  I had several studios on the narrow waterside between the Expressway and the Upper Bay, notably in Industry City before fleeing mad gentrification.  Beyond the memories of adventure and risk, and odd reward, is the realization that this space beneath the Expressway was an urban cathedral.  That it offered us a redemptive embrace.

Traveling and painting in Europe showed me Cathedral design followed idillic Pagan forest clearings, with symmetrical trees with perfect branches arching into ceilinged canopies, the space between trunks the light through stained glass windows.  And here, too, this two story exterior space - the ribbed directional steel structure following the dripping Gothic Cathedral ceiling following trees dripping with light in the leaves - here too, the light through the spaces between the columns like stained glass spaces between the trees.  And the jumbled group huddled together waiting out a storm, the Cathedral’s congregation.

I paint about urban architectural environments in the hopes of capturing the memories of urban inhabitants.  These structures must hold memories.

“GLASS CEILING (Detail)”, oil on canvas, 66” x 76”, 2026

“Glass Ceiling” deals with layers of dissected and faceted spaces, beginning as a study of the Crystal Palace in London which in the mid 19th century was the first ever glass ceiling in the history of civilization. Consider the human aspiration for transparent ceilings going back to early prehistory when some early human lifted a thin sheet of ice off a lake and barked to his companion how nice it would be if their cave had see through ceilings. Consider the lead limned glass panels as a thin umbrella dome above you. Then also consider an American traveling in European cities for the first time seeing the entire city broken into facets cut and delineated by tram lines. The streets, buildings, people and sky cut into the random sections of positive space within the boundaries of the tram line wires and cables. Consider how your eye only registers objects and spaces from your wandering glance and how your mind repeatedly creates and updates mental constructs of your surroundings as you move through time and space. This endless visual reverberation in gray.

“Daugavpils, Latvia #3”, acrylic on paper, 1.5m x 2m, 2025

This painting is from a series I made while in Residency at the Mark Rothko Museum in Daugavpils, Latvia. Daugavpils is Latvia’s second largest city after Riga and located near the Russian border. I spent a few weeks there in September, 2025 exploring the city and painting about it’s architecture. It has a mixture of unrenovated 19th century buildings and plenty of Soviet Bloc tenements, with a small city center adjacent to a large ancient fortress on the Daugava River. The paintings deal with the shapes and forms of the city as seen peripherally, where positive and negative space forms compete with the repeating forms in architecture, combining to form a better sense of how it feels to be in this city.

“BENEATH THE EL”, oil on canvas, 70” x 80”, 2019.