BIOGRAPHY

Painting is a hobby I began in 1976, when I was 15 years old.  I stopped painting from the mid-1980s until around 1998, when I started the hobby again.  I did not study visual art in college; instead, I took an interest in acting and attended the theater school at California Institute of the Arts.  My one "mainstream" claim to fame as a paid actor was an "under-five" in Paul Schrader's 1988 film Patty Hearst, in which I was originally billed as "the Mexican."  I also performed in and directed theatrical productions, wrote a couple of screenplays, won a Writers Guild Fellowship, optioned a script for $1.00 and then stopped in the late 1990s because I don't enjoy writing fiction, nor could I muster any interest in trying to sell a script. 

 

I have taken some visual art courses since my teens, including an etching and wood cut workshop at Self-Help Graphics in Los Angeles in the late 1990s.   I believe that creativity is instinctive--if we're made in the likeness of God, it's our way of ordering and creating our internal and external environments. 

 

In addition to a BFA from CalArts, I also have an MA in English from Cal State L.A., and I currently teach  English Language Arts at a public high school in Highland Park.