Circus

The factors that influence my art the most are: my experiences working in film, theater, radio broadcasting, and photography; my dyslexia, more specifically dysgraphia; and having lived in NYC for three years, Korea for five years, and traveling throughout Asia and other destinations around the globe.
Having worked as a Director of Photography and still photographer has a strong influence on my composition and use of color in my artworks. Working as a lighting director and theater technician is a strong influence on how I use temperature, intensity, hue, tone, tint, and shade in my artworks.
My form of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and my cross-dominance, mean that my spatial relationships are way off the mark. (If I ever give you directions, your best bet is to do the exact opposite.) Spatial relationships are the 3D relationships of objects in space, like relative position and distance apart. My slight misinterpretation of these relationships influences the balance, harmony, and composition of my pieces in unique ways.
My experiences living in New York City and Korea, and my extensive travel throughout the globe have had a noticeable influence on the themes and context of many of my pieces. One of these series is my use of swastikas. Having lived in Asia, these symbols have a completely different meaning to me compared to most Americans. A second series of paintings that I have started is the inverted paintings series. For these paintings, I have taken certain foods that can also be used as pejorative terms to describe contradictions between internal cultural preferences and societal cultural expectations. Examples are the terms “Oreos” for blacks, “Twinkies” for Asians, and “eggs” for people like myself (white on the outside, and yellow on the inside).