… Jean-Michel Basquiat asked me what I thought was the most difficult thing about being an artist. I said it was the constant struggle to be exceptional… He laughed. The laughter of fallen angels, the laughter of Opium Vapors and boiling coke. The laughter of being a mortal cursed with an immortal talent.

 
Excerpt from my diary.
June 29th, 1981

As an artist, I know my limitations and deeply understand my strengths, and over years of trial and error, I have learned which demons to fight, and which ones to embrace. I have experienced great successes and dismal failures, and have gone through periods where I have produced wonderful works, and many months of nothing but garbage. Back in the 1980’s when I was a student at the School of Visual Arts, the art scene in New York City was ruled by a handful of influential art dealers in the SoHo District, pseudo-Gods with the power to decree trends and make or break careers. There was not a single artist who had a website, and a can of spray paint was just as effective as today’s Twitter.
 

I was a part of the Underground Art Scene in New York for a short period of time, until I realized that the baroque appropriations I insisted in using in my work were not in fashion, and even if they had been, I was not yet twenty and not ready for the vices that seemed mandatory in order to keep up with the strides towards recognition. In 1982 I abruptly left the scene, and got a job selling luggage at B. Altman’s Department Store in White Plains New York. I had no intention of ever painting again.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1990, when AIDS had taken the lives of many friends, that I decided to start painting once again, mainly to deal with the devastation the epidemic had caused in my life. I created a series of twenty small paintings appropriating images from Goya’s “Los Caprichos” etchings. Having been away from the scene for six years, my connections to the Art World had all disappeared, and I decided to send unsolicited slides of the series (back then, slides were the only way galleries could see your work) to the ten most important galleries for emerging art at the time. Two months later, The Virginia Miller Gallery in Coral Gables Florida reached out to me, and in the fall of 1992 I had my first exhibition. My series was featured next to the works of Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Roberto Matta, and Fernando Botero. It was a decision that put my name on a complicated and unpredictable map, and would launch a career that in all honesty, I was not mature enough to handle.

Almost thirty years later, having achieved recognition and still poorly navigating a constantly changing Art Scene, I walk into my studio every morning and work on the most important thing in the life of any artist: that unfinished canvas sitting on the easel. Countless times over the years I’ve been told that having talent in this business is not enough… well, talent is the only thing I ever had.

I would like to personally welcome you to my website, and I hope that my art interest you.