ARTWORK
This section is new as of 2026 and in long-term development. I started creating artwork in my early 20’s, based on strong urges that engulfed me at a time and age when such things were natural to my immersion in film, writing and creativity, particularly as I developed friendships with individuals who maintained credible and inspiring art practices. These friends were some of the most influential in my life, yet it was my self sustained learning about the broader international contemporary art market that was the center of gravity steering everything.
The challenge with my early attempts at creating art, besides that most everything I produced was sorely lacking in talent or true direction, was that documentation was such a challenge. Even when I started producing paintings or works that I sensed were in the right direction, digital cameras were far in the future and I was an even worse photographer than I was an artist! At my current age its more fun to look back on this period with a degree of nostalgia and a healthy dose of levity, understanding that all artists start somewhere and that much of the beginnings include the thrill of the challenge, at a time when patience was much easier to adopt with such things, even for someone almost entirely lacking patience!
HATU TERESED (1990’s)
Each year during the 90’s, Salt Lake City’s most hip, inspirational and uber-creative individual, Joe Stetich, would invite fellow artists from town to participate in his annual Calendar initiative Hatu Teresed, which if you can’t figure it out, is Deseret Utah spelled backwards. It was a super cool project, each artist contributing I think 100 hand crafted page, each representing one month of the year, for a limited edition objet d’art that was sold in select retail gift shops or cultural spaces. I longed to participate, and when I finally was connected and respected enough to be invited, I took that bull by the horns and ran with it for seven years. It was no easy task at all, as you can see by the results, but easily one of the most fun communal engagements one could participate in, no doubt a legendary concept that can perhaps still be found today in various forms in other creative sectors.
My first year was my most pure, an attempt to scrawl a grid of 364 days in impulsive, random images, like a complex jazz riff on paper. I think this attempt was quite successful, representing the origins of my original love for artwork in the form of illustration and comic books, of which I’ve returned to in my later years as a hard-core, niche based collector, preferring the rare and limited output of daring artists over those of commercial persuasion attempting to make a living at it. The rest of my pages are pretty bad, mostly found object collages that I tried to make work somehow but never with the same impact. But that’s okay, even one semi-qualified success can make up for a ton of bad art. The majority of my dabblings in the pursuit of stature as a visual artist could mostly be considered in this regard. I stopped even attempting to make art after running an art gallery and representing real artists, those with only one purpose in this world, to make great art. But my well rounded attempts in the more expansive range of creativity, through art, industrial design, film, graphic design and art curating, eventually all combine as a mostly satisfying life and pursuit.
