About Me

I am an artist and a natural science illustrator specializing in traditional media. Currently, I am a student in Gretchen Halpert’s scientific illustration course, and a freelance artist. My earliest inspirations were shows like Animal Planet and The Lion King, which instilled a fascination with nature and an eye for detail, especially big cats. My mom likes to tell the story of my righteous indignation when she misidentified jaguar print as cheetah print. As an adult, my voracious fascination with nature has matured into a deep passion for understanding and identifying all living things: birds, plants, mushrooms, reptiles, mammals, and amphibians are all equally exciting to my eye!  I am that person with at least one guidebook on every hike, and I am unable to watch movies without hearing the bird calls in the background.

I specialize in traditional media and my strongest categories are graphite, ink, acrylic, and colored pencil. Currently, I am actively diving into watercolor for its versatility and capacity for detail. For painting, I have the most experience with acrylic, but that is mostly due to the accessibility of the medium. In the future, I hope to gain more skill in oil painting, as well as a solid mastery of watercolor. Drawing in pencil and pen is something I’ve been doing since elementary school, and my recent courses with Gretchen Halpert have honed those skills tremendously.

As an artist, I use my eye for detail and understanding of organisms’ natural context and environment to faithfully portray the subjects of my work. I believe in the importance of scientific interpretation; the practice of communicating scientific concepts and ideas to a broader audience. My education at St. Olaf College shaped how I approach my art and my life. As a liberal arts college, it matched with my need to approach learning from multiple perspectives. I majored in Psychology, minored in Nordic Studies and Gender studies, and also focused on Art classes, Biology, Sociology. This wide range of perspectives has increased my curiosity and critical thinking about complex subjects, and added a unique type of depth and empathy for our fellow living organisms.

I live in St. Paul, Minnesota with my wife and a small menagerie of pets. While I love the lakes and rivers of Minnesota, I grew up in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and mountains continue to inspire my work.

My insatiable curiosity for the natural world leads me to make my own identification guides in my drawing books, and I deeply desire to contribute to the collective understanding and appreciation of the natural world. It’s one thing to see a bird, and a whole other experience to know who that bird is, where it might live, what it eats, and why it sings. My dream job is to apply that passion to art, so that others can better connect with the world around them and for that appreciation to fuel conservation.