I have spent most of my adult life making things. For more than thirty years, that has meant working as a graphic designer and art director, solving problems for clients ranging from Nissan and Mercedes-Benz to Microsoft, Boeing, adidas Golf, the PGA of America, Corbis, and Warner Bros. I learned a great deal during those years, probably more than I realized at the time. Design taught me how to look closely, how to ask better questions, how to make decisions, and how to take an idea that exists only in someone's head and somehow make it visible to everyone else.

Somewhere along the way, though, I started wanting something different from the work. I wanted to make things that didn't have to answer to a client, a deadline, a marketing objective, or a committee sitting around a conference table trying to decide whether everyone was comfortable with the shade of blue. I wanted to paint. So I went back to school and earned my BFA in Drawing and Painting in 2019, followed by an MA in 2023. It was an unusual move after three decades in the design business, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Painting changed the way I understood design, and design changed the way I approached painting. The two disciplines began talking to each other in my head. Composition, color, typography, form, rhythm, image-making, storytelling, and all the other things I had spent decades thinking about suddenly had a different playground. I became less interested in keeping the disciplines separate and much more interested in what happens when they start bumping into one another.

That curiosity has become a pretty important part of how I work. I paint, draw, design, write, make prints, collect images, fill sketchbooks, and occasionally wander off into some experiment that may or may not turn into anything. Some of it works beautifully. Some of it is a spectacular waste of time. Both are useful. The studio has become less about producing a predictable body of work and more about following the things that make me curious.

Teaching entered that mix almost naturally. After spending so many years learning by doing, I found myself wanting to share some of what I had figured out, along with the things I was still trying to figure out. I teach graphic design and art, and I have come to see teaching as another form of making. You put an idea in front of someone, they take it apart, turn it upside down, misunderstand it in a completely unexpected way, and occasionally come back with something that makes you rethink the idea yourself. That's a pretty good deal for a teacher.

The longer I work, the more convinced I become that the interesting stuff happens in the connections. A painting can teach me something about design. A design problem can change the way I see a painting. A student can say something that sends me back to the studio. A sketchbook scribble can become the beginning of an entirely different idea. An observation made while walking around with a cup of coffee can sit quietly in the back of my head for three years before suddenly becoming useful.

That is probably why observation has become such an important part of my practice. Before an idea, there is usually something that caught my attention. A shape. A face. A color relationship. A strange bit of lettering on the side of a truck. The way two people stand together. A shadow falling across a wall. Most of these things are completely ordinary, and most of them disappear almost as quickly as they arrive. But every once in a while, something sticks.

I have learned to pay attention to those things.

The sketchbooks are where I tend to catch them. The paintings are where some of them eventually end up. The design work gives other ideas a place to live, and writing gives me a way to chase down the ones that won't leave me alone. Teaching lets me pass some of that along to other people. None of these things exists entirely on its own anymore, and I'm perfectly happy with that.

I'm still figuring out where all of this is going. After thirty years in one part of the creative world, I have become surprisingly comfortable with not knowing exactly what comes next. There are still paintings I want to make, ideas I want to chase, students I want to teach, things I want to write, and an unreasonable number of sketchbook pages I haven't looked at in years.

So that's where I am.

Still making things. Still looking around. Still curious about what might happen if I follow an idea a little farther than I probably should.

And, after all these years, I'm still having a pretty damn good time doing it.