A long, long, long time ago, before I was a documentary filmmaker, I was an animator, and before that I was a painter — and I somehow made a living painting and selling paintings for a couple of years.

When I was completing my senior year of college, I decided that majoring in “Graphic Design” wasn’t very fulfilling. Against all advice, I decided to focus most of my energy in my last year of college on painting. I remember to this day my painting instructor telling me, “you realize that if you become a painter you are competing with other luxury items, like Ferrari dealerships and mink coat manufacturers, right?”

I didn’t fully understand what he meant, nor did I think that applied to me at a tender age of 23. After selling out shows in coffee shops and restaurants around my home town of Winston-Salem, NC – in 1997 I made the trek to New York City to try to “make it as a painter”. Once arriving there I realized my instructor was right.

When I was in North Carolina, people loved and purchased my paintings because, well… they loved and wanted to buy them. However, in New York City, professional painters are an extension of fashion —- and their success mattered not how good they were, or how pretty the work was, but instead how “trendy” it was.

I found all my fellow painting peers trying to emulate Andy Warhol or John Basquiat, without any sense of personal style or personal vision. They had it instilled in them that “they must paint like the painters before them in order to be successful”. You know what? They were right! Gallery owners loved to see painters who looked like all the other painters. They didn’t know how to handle or deal with a “new” style or vision.

The gallery world in New York City is a stale and shallow world. It just recycles the same old stuff, because it’s safe and it sells. Newcomers aren’t welcome, especially newcomers with a fresh voice.

I often wonder if technology didn’t grow as it has since the days of the “masters” like Picasso, Bacon, or whomever—if people like Spielberg and other big directors of film wouldn’t also be painters themselves.

You have to ask: “where are all the good painters anymore?” There was a time when painters were superstars, on the covers of magazines, selling out shows, and had the same type of popularity and influence as politicians or celebrities like Brad Pitt or Spielberg. If you ask me, those days are over. Now it’s graffiti artists who vandalize phone booths, and then end up in galleries. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I love me some “Banksy” as much as the next guy.

I am still painting. See my online gallery here.