As a visual learner PS gravitates to the actual creation of images as a way to humor a brain hard wired to download and retrieve hundreds of thousands of pictures. Born in Manhattan, NYC, USA in 1959, and raised there, he acquired his first camera, a Kodak Instamatic Hawkeye at the age of 8 by responding to an offer on the back of a cereal box, requiring a couple of box tops and a small dollar check. He subsequently carried this camera, then a Konica rangefinder S2, and a Nikomat F everywhere he went, shooting over 2,500 35mm pictures which are presently all digitized and archived.
During his college years at Hobart and William Smith, Columbia University, UCLA, and UC Boulder he studied European History, Religious Studies, Art History, Astronomy, Photography and Film Production. His final dissertation for the Independent Study Studio Art requirement was a solo exhibition of his black and white photographs depicting gritty and decaying cityscapes of the 1970s. His baccalaureate dissertation was a bi-disciplinary study of the effects of the propagandist film-maker and photographer, Leni Reifenstahl on the hearts and minds of the German people during the Third Reich. Today, photography still has an important place in the oeuvre of his work. Many of the portfolios and series have a photographic element as a part of the mixed media, self-appropriated and reworked images that eventually become finished artworks. As Jasper Johns once said: “Take something, do something to it, then do something else to it.”
After graduating, he went on to produce sporting goods companies’ promotional films, MTV teaser ads, and television commercials for LGFE, a division of JWT. He then crossed over to the production side of the business and represented film directors. I continued my education at NYU and proceeded to then manage the international businesses for two leading art dealers from the EU.
His journey has led to the development of a body of artwork that transcends the world as experienced through our unaided senses, to invite the viewer into a sub particle world that inhabits The Space Between The Spaces. The paintings are created over time and through the use of many layers that eventually weave together to build up what one would see in the minutiae of the micro-nano universe. The development of a picture is always the expression of an impulse, a force of and from nature. A fusion of natural law and spontaneous energy communicated through paint.
Kandinsky, Hofmann, Miro, Francis, Pollock, Polke, Stingel, Wool, Twombly and Ryman. These artists inform the work. He takes their masterful influence and marinates it into his own personal style of abstraction. At once both dizzying and calming, a picture reflects the dialectical tension between a wave and a particle. Between a moment and eternity, between supersymetry and abject chaos.