My family and I moved multiple times when I was a child, due in part to the Savings and Loan Crisis of the eighties, and unemployment. We bounced around for a few years, living in RV’s, mobile homes, and a back room at my grandparent’s house, but eventually settled in Bend, Oregon in the mid-nineties. I couldn’t afford college after moving out of my mother’s house in my late teens, but desiring to still pursue art, I moved to Portland, Oregon and began making and exhibiting paintings, mostly landscapes. In my mid-twenties I was awarded a grant from the Calligram Foundation which offered me the resources and freedom to make artwork without the necessity of trying to sell it. At the same time, I began a rigorous study of contemporary art; however, being disenchanted by the “art-world”, I started making work more intuitively and by drawing from my intimate experiences (partly based on the nuanced and complicated anxiety that comes along with being lower-class in the United States). I currently work at a frame shop in Portland, and I live with my wife and our son in Milwaukie, Oregon, where I make art in my backyard studio.