About

i can do it. illustration, design, art, animation, web. i love a challenge.

i was born in the water sign of pisces, in the year of the dragon, in brooklyn, new york.

at the age of six, la familia transplanted from concrete to country, to rural upstate, new york, where i climbed trees, built forts, gnarly bike paths with rooted bumps, druid-inspired wooded dwellings, and basically exercised my imagination muscle to its fullest. as a child, i was never very far from paper, pen, pencil or paints.

at the age of 18, i returned to the city to study and major in fashion illustration at the fashion institute of technology, minoring in advertising design. the illustration program was amazing, really, in that, we spent six intensive hours a day, drawing from live models.

upon graduation, however, the fashion illustration market was very much at an all-time low. advertisers were not interested in the old-fashioned institution of illustration, and preferred slick, glossy photography. i trudged the steamy streets of new york with my 24” x 30” portfolio, blistering my hands, until I finally landed my first industry job with the very exciting and irreverent designer, norma kamali. i was the in-house spec artist, flat-sketching garments to scale for production. the work itself was more technical than creative, but the atmosphere and norma’s designs were original and inspiring.

for the next five years I worked in the garment industry, the first two of those with norma. one gig, i was actually, officially, a designer of socks. pretty kooky. but it did enable me to travel, the first of many trips, to asia: tokyo, bangkok, taipei, hong kong.

my last gig in the garment industry was with a fairly young designer, ephraim malavé. ephraim was a truly talented and unique designer, and had a small, yet very cool line of women’s clothes. he was impassioned with wool jersey and cotton lycra, and was a master of drapery. i learned so much from ephraim, who was, unfortunately, dying of aids. his business shut its doors in 1989.

i saw this as a sign, to move on from the fashion industry and get back to following my dream of being an artist / Illustrator.

i returned to school and studied (old-school) animation at the school of visual arts, nyc, and film at nyu. these studies led to work in film production; most notably, assistant wardrobe on the blockbuster film, teenage mutant ninja turtles II: the secret of the ooze; a trivial, yet quirky note on the resumé.

in 1991, i moved to tokyo, japan. i landed a job with the monthly publication, tokyo today magazine. in the beginning i contributed to the magazine by way of writing, until a design opportunity opened up in the art department. it was there i honed my graphic design skills, applying my ‘old-school’ advertising design education to the fairly new medium of computers. i cut my teeth on the apple IIci. learned page layout on a program called, pagemaker.

i took to the computer and its software programs immediately. especially the adobe illustrator program.

i spent the next few years living and working in japan, designing magazines and illustrating as much as possible. in the course of the four years I was in tokyo, i had two successful gallery exhibitions of my abstract paintings, quite a departure from my graphic design and Illustration work.

i returned to new york in 1995, and found myself, again, pounding the pavement, portfolio in hand. although this time, thanks to computers, the format of my book was not as unwieldy and blister-prone. i landed a job as a graphic designer at self magazine, where i worked in the trenches, so to speak, for the next four years. i left self at the end of 1999, and ventured out on my own, as an illustrator and as a graphic designer. for the past nine years i have been successfully pursuing a career in publishing, and often have projects that call for both skill sets.

i have an extensive illustration client list: architectural digest, gq, vogue, glamour, bento japan, among many other publications.

recently, I produced over 200 illustrations for the companion website to the nbc usa networks program starring debra messing, the starter wife.

and life does come full-circle. I am back in brooklyn, new york, the place whence I was hatched.