Although I have been creating art since I can remember holding a pencil, my artistic education did not truly begin until my sophomore year of high school. It was then that I discovered the Schuler School of Fine Arts, a small atelier school hidden in the labyrinth of downtown Baltimore. At the Schuler School I was trained in the methods and techniques of the European Old Masters. As far as art institutions go, this was a rare find. The focus of their instruction is to assure that future generations of artists draw from the wisdom of the past while developing an individualized creative form of expression that is rooted in traditional skills. My artistic method went through a major transition as I learned about the legacy of artistic genius that preceded me. I reveled in the endless glazes of a Titian and the passion of a Carravaggio. I marveled at the flow and rhythm of line found in the drawings of Rubens and Raphael. I was mesmerized by the strength and vigor of Michelangelo's sculptural labors.
I have continued to study classical art since then, in both my university art history classes and in other art institutions. I am currently a Fine Arts major at the University of Pennsylvania (and a studious premed) and I have focused my artistic attentions on figurative and portrait work primarily. I have also studied at the Florence Academy of Art, taking workshops in figurative sculpture, renaissance art history and human anatomy study. This past summer I spent most of my week at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, taking portrait painting classes and figurative sculpture. I keep myself engaged in the art world as much as possible, whether it is producing, reading, viewing or simply dreaming about it...
I like to think of my artistic production over the past few years as a visual complement to my own personal maturation and growth. As a student of both the fine arts and the sciences I have discovered many intersections between the two. I have found that my love of the natural sciences has strongly influenced my artistic outlook and production. My scientific pursuits have trained me to pay close attention to organization, pattern and detail. In my art, this meticulous kind of observation drives my technique; it has inspired my devotion to the realist tradition and pushes me to aim for accuracy in likeness, color and form. However, I do not believe that a love of realism should result in pure mimesis; rather, it is from a working knowledge of optics, perspective, anatomy, and many other fundamental laws that the artist is enabled to innovate and create.
The renowned Renaissance genius, Leonardo da Vinci, was famed for using his drawing and art to convey his understanding of structure, mechanics and function. He believed that a successful realist artist was not simply a faithful imitator of nature, but instead, an inventor who first discerned the rules of the world and then created art by improvising and abstracting from nature. I find his vision of the artist as a naturalist inventor to be the model for my own artistic evolution. In my art, my goal is to convey not simply what I see but how I see. I strive to create art which is not only reflective of the world external to me but is also a reflection of my internal world.