I haven’t always been a painter, but I realize that I have spent much of my life working, however circuitously, toward becoming one.

I took my first studio class my freshman year at Smith College, but I wasn’t encouraged and didn’t have the confidence to continue, so I detoured into art history—writing and teaching about art rather than making it—through a Ph.D. in Byzantine art at the Institute of Fine Arts. But after part-time teaching gigs at Connecticut College and Yale Divinity School, I knew the academic life was not for me, that I wanted to make things.

So I opened a small press focused on publishing books about art and art history. Over a period of more than a decade, my company published titles on a range of subjects, from Egypt to H.C. Westerman to Eva Hesse. The books became less scholarly over time, less about art and more art projects unto themselves, including an award-winning photography and poetry collaboration with Bill Barrette and John Yau (Big City Primer).

Eventually I gave up commercial publishing entirely and opened a letterpress operation, where I could design and create books by hand. Which eventually led me back to studio classes, primarily at The School of Visual Arts and the New York Studio School, because what I really wanted to do was make art myself.

My print shop was about a mile from the World Trade Center, and in a post-9/11 reevaluation of priorities, I closed the shop, gave the press and the type to Smith, and turned to painting full time.

I’ve studied with Lennart Anderson, Susan Walp, John Lees, Steven Sheehan, Stuart Shils Wendy Artin, and most recently Joel Janowitz.