About Chad

I dropped out of art school young, spent twenty years in software sales, and somewhere in there convinced myself that was the responsible version of my life. It wasn't. In October 2024 my entire sales team got laid off. At first it was a shock. Then honestly a little exciting. I thought — this is it. Time to go all in on the art. Things didn't line up the way I hoped. But I've gotten better as a painter. That part is real.

I paint the figure — people, presence, the weight of being in a body. The work has been shifting toward something more expressive and less explained. Less narrative setup, more raw feeling. I'm not sure I can tell you exactly what a painting is about when I start it. Usually I find out somewhere in the middle, and by then the painting's already decided.

I start with a physical reference — a photo, a model, a location. At some point the painting takes on a life of its own, like it stopped coming from me. There's usually one moment that cracks it open. A lyric I'm listening to, a shift in the light, something that arrives sideways. That moment is what the whole painting was building toward, even before I knew it.

I work in oils. Classically trained, deliberately unfinished in places. The brushwork is supposed to show. I'm not interested in paintings that look like they made themselves.

I'm 55. I live in Colorado with my brother and two teenage kids. I have a real sense that time is not unlimited, and that makes every day in the studio matter more than it probably should. I read voraciously — spirituality, neuroscience, philosophy, how people learn, how people change. All of it comes into the studio with me.

I teach because I'm genuinely good at it, and because explaining something you love to someone who's trying to understand it is one of the better ways to spend an afternoon. I teach at the Boulder School of Fine Art — the same school where I started as a student in 2016.