Otherworldly landscapes & skyscapes containing dark primordial objects all belonging to a self-made mythology.

Brooklyn, NY. 34 BFA Ringling School of Art & Design, Sarasota, FL www.downfaster.com

I think my art has been mostly therapeutic in regards to how September 11th influenced me & how I dealt with my feelings about it. it's still pretty difficult to process the reality of being alive during a world-changing event, especially one that involved so much death & destruction. A kind of forced evolution occurred that day, so I think the long-term influence of the event will only be better understood when we look back on this in another 20-30 years. Immediately after 9/11 I was pretty obsessed with all those terrible images of people jumping out of windows & planes crashing into buildings, as were most Americans. At first I was directly referencing the actual events & images of that day, I guess as a way of dealing with what I saw on television and in photos. I used to include human figures in every painting until the buildings themselves became stand-ins for the people. Eventually my buildings became more anonymous, & finally the Black Tower began appearing as a surrogate for all those horrific details that still reside in our collective memory. I very rarely see any calculated references to 9/11 in my paintings now, as the Black Tower & the other black objects I paint have become more symbolic of a general feeling of unease, that something isn't right in the world.

Otherworldly landscapes & skyscapes containing dark primordial objects all belonging to a self-made mythology. To my girlfriend's ultra-conservative Catholic parents: contemporary landscapes.

I'm most influenced by the natural world around me, & I jump at any opportunity to get out of Brooklyn & surround myself with trees or desert or anything not man-made, unless it's abandoned & decaying. I'll often be inspired by how the sky looks at a specific moment of the day, then I'll go home & try to paint what I saw as a backdrop for my next piece. I look at a lot of nature & space photography, especially the Hubble photographs, which I find consistently mind-blowing. I'm also a big movie freak. I watch tons of horror, sci-fi, & anything else strange enough to catch my eye, mostly pre-90's films. If I could only have one movie to live with for the rest of my life, it would definitely be Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain. As far as artists go, some past & present: Pieter Breugel the Elder, Caspar David Friedrich, Arnold Bocklin, Johann Christian Dahl, Satty, Alex Grey, Gregory Crewdson, Michael Whelan, Alex Lukas, Chris Ballantyne, & my friends Esao Andrews & Steve Dixey,

I don't do much preliminary planning, usually just a tiny sketch to figure out the general layout of a new piece, then I just sit in front of a blank panel & let it happen.

Smallest brushes I can find, painter's tape, various rulers, lots of tiny jars of mixed acrylic colors.

Use half philanthropically- Build a huge art wing onto the public library in my hometown of Sarasota, FL in the name of my grandparents. Donate a shitload to Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, Sierra Club, & whatever other organizations I feel could use the money to better this world & ease my own guilt.

With the other half I'd stop painting in my kitchen & probably get an actual studio, and travel, a lot. Maybe get my dog's teeth cleaned professionally, & mine too.

I'm not afraid to fight for love.

Just finished artwork for Brooklyn band Midnight Masses first EP, then getting started on their full-length album design. Solo show in March at DDR Projects in Long Beach, CA.

Next July I will be embarking on a 3-4 month solo road trip around the USA (including Alaska) to take photos & research a book I'm planning about the United States, it's towns & parks, and all the crazy places & history contained therein.

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