Thanks for checking out my site; I put it together primarily to share my work and network about art and medical humanities. Here is more about where all of this comes from.
Art once was, and is increasingly again, a major part of my life. I painted, drew, and sculpted in high school at Cranbrook-Kingswood and then Hope College, where I “studied abroad” in NYC. After graduating I moved to NYC and spent the next decade drawing, painting, and sculpting. I also taught drawing and worked at an arts nonprofit (the New York Arts Program).
Gradually the inner necessity of making art faded and I was left wanting a career that would directly help others. With inspiration and support from my wife, Young, who pivoted from an MFA program to a family NP degree, I resurrected the desire to be a doctor that had preceded my engagement with art. I went back to school, and am very grateful today to have a career where I see patients and teach with an amazing group of colleagues at UC Davis.
Art was a banked fire for most of this time. I valued the role the arts had played in my life, and found opportunities to stay involved, for example via teaching mindful figure drawing workshops. But I rarely felt the need to make art for its own sake.
That changed, somehow, early in 2025. The desire to paint regularly returned, and I have happily reengaged with abstraction. My work in art education has also increased, and those two things are probably not unrelated! There is a lot to say about the overlap of psychiatric practice, medical education, abstraction, and art generally, but I think at the core of this is a tension between the ineffability of experience and the desire to communicate it. So I’ll let my paintings speak first, but please check out my CV for some specific things I have said about this.
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and please contact me if you’re interested in collaborating or talking more!