Art has always been an integral part of my life. My mother has enjoyed a successful career as a portraitist and throughout my childhood, was often at work, painting. The portrait that she painted of me at the age of five still hangs in my parents’ living room.

In high school, I enrolled in a rigorous art major program and upon graduation, earned a full merit scholarship to Tyler School of Art, Temple University (BFA, Summa Cum Laude, received the Bertha Lowenburg Prize for excellence in art). I spent my junior year in Rome, Italy, a city saturated with art, culture, and history. To this day, the year I spent there continues to influence my work as an artist.

While at Temple University (MFA in scenic design for the theater), I studied “trompe l’oeil” and large-scale scenic painting. I applied these skills creating murals and various forms of decorative painting and faux finishes for residential and commercial clients. That work grew into a successful business. But the idea that I would one day explore the beauty of the human face and form as a portrait artist germinated and grew stronger over the years. I completed a number of workshops in formal painting techniques with renowned portrait painters, Daniel Greene and Burton Silverman. To further hone my skills in portraiture, I studied figure painting at the Fleisher Art Memorial, and landscape and drapery painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

I believe that a keen eye, sensitivity and an open heart are needed to fully express the spark and nuances of a subject’s inner spirit and in the process, bring life to their external appearance. I invite you to view these portraits and hope that you will find the subjects as engaging and as unique as I did when I painted them. I welcome your questions and responses.