I'm an artist who lives and works in Watertown, MA, just outside of Boston. I studied painting at Cornell University and later studied under Lorenzo Lazzeri in Florence. I paint mainly in watercolor, although I do use ink and tempera in my work. I am a cartoonist and a portrait painter.

Having grown up near Boston, my first artistic influences came at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. As a child, I remember enjoying the works of John Singleton Copley, the early American portraitist - especially "Watson and the Shark," which depicts a scene from his client's life in which he was nearly devoured by a shark in the waters of Havana Bay. Throughout my early years, I was never far away from the Museum, whether it be summer courses, the high school honors class, or just general purpose visits. Later, as I began painting oils in high school, I would come to especially appreciate the works by Sargent there. Perhaps the most technically gifted of all American painters, Sargent so impressed me at that age that I wrote my college entrance essay about his painting, "The Daughters of Edward D. Boit."

I attended Cornell University as a Fine Arts major, with a concentration in painting. Although the painting faculty emphasized oils above all other media, it was there that I discovered an affinity for watercolor. The results of that discovery can be found all over this site. My earliest works in watercolor were "The Dark" and "Caravaggio", which are illustrated short stories. Although I didn't realize it at the time, I was slowly working my way back to comics, which I had deeply enjoyed in my teenage years. Only I was attempting to use text and images together in a way that would be acceptable to my art school professors.

After Cornell, I worked for a time as a freelance illustrator, mostly for school textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin. I also worked at Barnes & Noble. I wasn't enjoying myself too much, so I saved up and went to Florence to renew my passion for painting. There I studied under an Italian painter, Lorenzo Lazzeri, a man of great ability who was a real inspiration to me. I learned to speak Italian, met my wife Akiko, and came up with the idea for the graphic novel Machiavelli. It would be a while before I came back and really begin working on the book though. For more Machiavelli, see that part of the site.

After Florence, I focused mainly on portraits, as you can see in my Portrait gallery. My commissioned works include portraits of Dr. Katherine Wolf as well as Eliot & Jessica Cail-Sirota - all can be viewed there.

In 2002, I renewed work on Machiavelli and began other comics projects, while continuing doing portrait work.