About

Precision has always guided my practice—the hand of a surgeon at an artery, the violinist’s measured touch on a Stradivarius, the painter’s patient sedimentation of pigment. Like those professions, my work seeks exactitude but also the unexpected connections that surface when matter and perception meet. From the beginning, I’ve held to three touchstones: the pursuit of meaning, the exploration of material, and the search for new ways to understand what it means to be human.

This approach led to my Propositions series, a long-running body of work that built both a language of layered surfaces and a philosophical framework of titling influenced by Baruch Spinoza’s Geometrical Method. With hundreds of layers built up on beveled supports, the Propositions are not simply paintings but chromatic events—works that shift with light and with the viewer’s movement. Pigment, gold, diamond dust, iron, and other materials enter the surface for their physical and symbolic weight. These planes, at once viscous and geometric, sensual and mechanical, invite a deliberate slowing in an accelerated world. To encounter a Proposition is to witness color in motion, matter in conversation with perception, painting in dialogue with time.

Even then, I was preoccupied with the limits of sight. The eye is precise yet partial: it offers focus within a narrow band while leaving vast ranges unregistered. That realization drew me into collaboration with scientists—first at the Heller Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering/Weill Cornell in New York, and later with the Weisman Lab at Rice University in Houston—to explore innovations in optics and test how painting might operate at the edge of perception. Advances in material science allowed me to work with carbon nanotubes—cylindrical allotropes of carbon with remarkable optical traits. Over time I developed a way to separate carbon nanotubes into distinct chiral structures that fluoresce in the infrared spectrum and suspend them in a custom binder to create a new kind of paint. These unique chiralities expand my palette beyond the visible: colors that can’t be seen directly by the eye but can be registered through instruments and, perhaps more profoundly, imagined by the mind.

Working with this unseen material changed how I paint and how I look. It also changed how I listen. I’m the father of a five-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son. Their endless curiosity—their relentless why, their instinct to treat the world as an experiment—has become a daily education in perception. Children navigate by hypothesis; they test, observe, and revise. Their questions return my attention to thresholds adults often overlook: the way shadows cool the temperature of color, the strange doubleness of reflection, the difference between what we see and what we infer. Fatherhood hasn’t pulled me away from the studio—it’s recalibrated it. It’s taught patience and the slow pursuit of clarity. It’s made me more attentive to what’s unrecorded but consequential—just as infrared wavelengths shape experience while remaining beyond direct sight. The scientific and the personal, for me, aren’t separate tracks; they’re parallel modes of care and attention.

This meeting of precision, material inquiry, and lived experience led to a new series: Reflected Fields. The title joins two ideas—reflection, light bouncing off a surface both literally and metaphorically, and fields, spaces of perception and influence, from the physical to the electromagnetic. Together they suggest surfaces that reflect both light and thought across visible and invisible wavelengths. For this body of work, I turned to the hoods of 1960s and 1970s Chevrolet C10 trucks—objects carrying both personal and cultural gravity. These were the trucks of my father and grandfather, machines of labor and mobility. The choice wasn’t incidental. My Jewish family would never buy a Ford, given Henry Ford’s virulent anti-Semitism and the poisonous legacy it left behind. To drive a Chevrolet was not just practical—it was a quiet act of resistance, an insistence on dignity and survival woven into the most ordinary details of American life. The C10 came to symbolize a distinctly American ideal: the merging of craftsmanship, identity, and freedom at a time when design, labor, and self-determination converged. To work on their hoods now is to step into that lineage of inheritance—of family, of material, of history.

The hoods speak to a particular American generation. In the decades after World War II, the combustion engine organized both landscape and labor. Trucks became emblems of freedom and productivity, even as oil shocks, civil-rights struggles, and political upheavals complicated that promise. Today we live in a different but reminiscent moment—an age of energy transition, climate crisis, algorithmic speed, and renewed polarization. The resemblance isn’t identity: what once expressed power through visible machinery now operates through invisible networks—code, data, and supply chains that rarely show themselves. Reflected Fields places a durable object from one technological era in conversation with the unseen architectures of another. Steel meets infrared. Memory meets measurement. Biography meets science. These works aren’t nostalgic—they’re acts of observation and repair, asking what persists across generations: mobility as necessity, perception as extension, and art as a means of continuity and understanding.

This series situates the hoods within painting’s evolving conversation. They extend the logic of the shaped canvas as reimagined by Frank Stella, who declared that “what you see is what you see,” allowing form to emerge from structure itself. Yet these hoods advance that premise by infusing geometry with biography: their contours determined not by abstraction but by industrial design and lived inheritance. They also speak with the West Coast Finish Fetish and Light and Space artists—McCracken, Irwin, Turrell—who shifted attention toward surface and perception, and with Rauschenberg’s Combines, where everyday materials crossed into painting. Within this lineage, the Reflected Fields turn mechanical precision into perceptual experience, converting labor into light and engineering into sensation.

At the same time, the works share something with Restomod culture—the practice of restoring classic forms while updating them with new performance and technology. Each hood becomes a hybrid: part artifact, part experiment. Layers of sanding, burnishing, and coating hold a conversation between preservation and invention, echoing a larger cultural impulse to reconcile memory with progress.

While Richard Prince’s hood works treated the automobile as an image of American desire and masculine display, the Reflected Fields return to the hood as a site of transformation—where biography, craft, and optical investigation converge. They link the histories of my father and grandfather’s trucks with the material and perceptual research of the present. The hood, once a vehicle for motion, becomes a reflective plane where personal and collective histories meet. These works follow how identity endures through matter: how design encodes belief, how resistance embeds itself in daily habit, and how touch and care remain among our most enduring gestures.

The Reflected Fields mark both return and evolution—a weaving of material, memory, and method. They carry forward the conceptual reach of earlier series like Propositions, translating those microscopic investigations into a more public, architectural language. In bridging art, science, and mechanical culture, the Reflected Fields insist that making is a way of thinking—a continual act that reclaims touch, light, and lived experience as forms of discovery. This series has renewed my practice much as fatherhood has renewed my sense of self. Both have widened what feels possible, revealing that creation—whether of art or of life—demands humility, persistence, and wonder. Through these works, I’ve come to see more clearly the rhythm between care and experimentation, and how being a father, an artist, and a person are all versions of the same task: to build, to test, and to keep learning what it means to see. That lesson has also reignited my faith in art itself—its lasting ability to shift perspective, deepen empathy, and remind us that even within the most familiar materials, there is always something new waiting to be found.