I'm a photographer and painter in Cincinnati. Photography came first, in the late 1990s, and I came to painting in 2024. I studied philosophy and never left it.

I grew up in a large Catholic homeschooled family that placed real weight on classical education and moral order. Art mattered in that house. Michelangelo, Matisse, and Stieglitz all sat on the same shelf, and no one felt a contradiction. Their nude work was even considered beautiful because it was seen to fit a proper ontological frame. My interest in the subject started when I noticed how the anxiety spiked the moment someone ignored the moral rules, rules everyone treated as deductions from settled truths. The more I probed, the fewer coherent views I found, which only raised more questions. At first I assumed the unease was the conservatism I was raised in, but I found the same dictates on the left, only relabeled. The nude triggers an ethical reflex like few other subjects. The reaction comes first, and the reasons get fitted to it afterward, on the left as on the right. It's a problem I keep returning to.

I think art is first an aesthetic problem, not a mere delivery system for a message. When politics or sentiment take the wheel, the picture stops being art and becomes something else. What I'm after is harder to name. A good picture seems to know something I can't yet put into words, but I don't mean this mystically. The knowledge is real but not yet made explicit, the way you can recognize a face long before you could describe it.

In a world full of information, attraction does the finding. It clues me into where to look and what to pull out of everything I could photograph or paint. It's not proof the picture is any good, only a place to start. The judgment comes after, and it can be wrong. From there, the challenge is to make something worthy of attention.