I grew up in the bland sea of suburban New York, and spent my late teens working in my father's construction company. But I spent my entire youth drawing the people around me, and voraciously copied drawings of Old Masters from books. At the age of twenty three, disenchanted by the modern art scene, I fled to Florence, Italy. I wandered the alleyways of Florence until I came across the Charles Cecil Studios. Under some of the leading figures in contemporary European figurative art, I spent several years studying Baroque painting techniques and the history of art, from Giotto to Sargent. I've returned to New York with this vocabulary of painting, returned to what I once believed to be the bland, suburban sea of Long Island. But my epiphany is that the inconspicuous hamlet of Islip was home to all the drama, tragedy and comedy that Shakespeare ever penned. I live in a world where people suffer, laugh, regret, hide, hope, forgive, hate. I spend my time trying to capture, if only to the smallest extent, the story that somebody's eyes can tell, the history that an object can relay, the drama that the old plywood walls of a fishing warehouse would speak of if they could talk.