Vehicles Of Expression
I’m a native New Yorker who studied art at Queens College during the 1970s while driving a taxi through the city at night. That unique combination; artist, taxi driver, and New Yorker, gave me a front-row seat to a city in constant motion.
There was a time when Max’s Kansas City stood at the center of New York’s emerging art scene, a place where artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, James Rosenquist, Brice Marden, Mary Heilmann, Robert Smithson and David Bowie gathered there alongside Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd and many others. Their experimentation with abstraction, found materials, urban culture, and new ways of seeing continues to resonate with the spirit behind my own work.
And I was there too.
Not inside as an artist, but outside, driving my taxi, picking up customers on the streets and waiting for the next fare.
Those nights became part of my education as an artist. Moving through New York, I began discovering beauty in places most people simply passed by, the backs of trucks, their weathered surfaces, bold typography, colors, numbers, reflections, and unexpected compositions.
The Streets Became My Studio
The bustling world of traffic sparked my imagination. I began transforming these ordinary, working-class objects into paintings that celebrate the visual language of the city and the people who keep it moving.
The back of a truck may not traditionally be considered a subject for fine art. I saw it differently.
I saw a constantly changing canvas.
Using a modern-day grid technique, I create pictorial spaces that are immediately recognizable while transforming everyday urban imagery into something unexpected. The grid connects the image to reality while allowing me to explore abstraction, color, structure, movement, and perception.
My intention is to demystify art, to make it accessible, familiar, and connected to everyday life.
You don't need to stand in a museum to encounter art.
You may already be looking at it on the street. A truck stopped at a traffic light. A delivery vehicle parked on a city block.
A fleeting image seen through a taxi window. These ordinary moments become invitations to stop, look again, and discover something we might otherwise overlook.
Vehicles of Expression
Ultimately, these paintings are about more than vehicles.
These abstract paintings invite the viewer to look, discover, and then experience a moment of frisson, that sudden thrill when you realize that what initially appears to be pure abstraction has its origins in something remarkably familiar: the backs of trucks moving through the streets of New York.
That recognition creates a bridge between the familiar and the unexpected, between everyday life and art.
Vehicles of Expression is my invitation to see the extraordinary in the everyday and to discover the art that may have been passing you all along.