This Bernie Guy
I'm an illustrator and a writer. A doodler and a rambler. Inspiration speaks to me in a million different ways daily, and I love figuring out what that all might mean. The truth is that I see voices, I hear landscapes, and you may think that all sounds a bit crazy. Well, at times I do too, but for me that’s just how creativity works. Not all the time, but every once in a while when everything aligns just right inspiration will enter like a combustible, fiery cyclone of ideas. Surprising you with it's randomness, and madden you with its persistence. It also can often be elusive, sly, and a bit of a trickster. All of these traits prove to me that creativity is the ultimate mystery, and it's precisely what gets me out of bed each day.
Perhaps after all that rambling you are looking for more of a traditional approach to who I might be at the surface. Well, currently I live in a very remote part of NY state, where I live on my own in a place overlooking beautiful rolling hills. This is where I get to enjoy the sun rising and setting each day right out my door. It’s also where I work on most of my projects. All the stuff that comes to me through that spiritual download we’ve already mentioned. During my weekly, daytime hours, I work in a small town nearby as the Senior Art Director in the Communications department of Colgate University. So, you see creativity is a huge part of my life. It’s always around me, and in fact, I can vividly remember creating as far back as 6 years of age. Which may be when I chose this creative life, or maybe more accurately, a creative life chose me.
Now, to get really personal, I've had my trying times over the years, and not everything was about drawing rainbows and writing flowery poetry. I’ve been through some shit and that’s where I found this creativity as my lifeline. I experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in 2000, followed by a leukemia diagnosis in 2001, both of which I speak freely about in my books]. I mention this not for sympathy, but rather to show how these events shaped my perspective on life. Where I started to understand the light in life more since I vastly experienced the dark. These opposites have become the driving force behind my creations, and have fueled my desire to share as much as possible of what comes into my space.
As corny as it sounds, I would like the world to be a better place and at times I've witnessed that it can be. I whole heartedly agree that “we are all in this together” and we are all somehow connected. So, whether in a piece of art, a cartoon, or in the written form, I’m sharing the positivity that speaks to me in the only way I know how...one story at a time.