About Me |
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I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I teach first grade in Albuquerque Public Schools, where I do as many art projects as I can with my kiddos while also teaching them to read, write and do math. I’ve been teaching for 32 years, and I still like it.
I love to paint. I like juggling quite a bit, too.
I also like hiking, gardening, and singing, and my wife Tina loves all those things too, which worked out very well.
Lately I’ve been baking a lot of bread.
My dad, interior designer Ernest Young, loved looking at paintings of the gorgeous New Mexico landscape, and that love is probably why I love looking at them, and painting them. My son, Albuquerque artist Simon Young, has little interest in painting the gorgeous New Mexico landscape, but he would have no trouble creating a fresco on the ceiling of a vast gothic chapel somewhere, or creating elaborate woodcuts in a medieval workshop. My daughter Abby has no interest in painting anything anywhere, but she and I go to Cane’s a lot and eat fried chicken, which is just as fulfilling.
Abby is also willing to hike the Grand Canyon, and other terribly difficult locales.
None of these people would be anywhere near New Mexico if not for my mom Judy, who went to summer camp in the Jemez Mountains when she was a teen, where she learned a lot of ghost stories she passed on to me when I was young.
I’ve been drawing all my life, but only started painting recently.
I first tried to paint the style of landscapes I loved best- the same ones my father loved- impressionist renderings of the southwest. We loved Wilson Hurley; my father gave me a framed Wilson Hurley print when I went to college. But I also loved Ed Mell’s art-deco inspired landscapes, and I’ve always loved the comics- Peanuts and Bloom County, B.C. and Tumbleweeds.
I think I’m trying to put all this together: Hurley and Mell and Charles Schultz.
I majored in Architecture for a while, back when we still had to learn to draw to be architects, where drawing meant trying to share how space was organized, what the layers were, and how it gets used. Training in that particular kind of drawing is in me, too, and is part of how I paint.
A few years ago, as my style evolved, people started saying they saw ‘joy’, in my work, and I’ve decided to lean into that, to let that joy into my paintings and give it room to grow.
I love to paint. I like juggling quite a bit, too.
I also like hiking, gardening, and singing, and my wife Tina loves all those things too, which worked out very well.
Lately I’ve been baking a lot of bread.
My dad, interior designer Ernest Young, loved looking at paintings of the gorgeous New Mexico landscape, and that love is probably why I love looking at them, and painting them. My son, Albuquerque artist Simon Young, has little interest in painting the gorgeous New Mexico landscape, but he would have no trouble creating a fresco on the ceiling of a vast gothic chapel somewhere, or creating elaborate woodcuts in a medieval workshop. My daughter Abby has no interest in painting anything anywhere, but she and I go to Cane’s a lot and eat fried chicken, which is just as fulfilling.
Abby is also willing to hike the Grand Canyon, and other terribly difficult locales.
None of these people would be anywhere near New Mexico if not for my mom Judy, who went to summer camp in the Jemez Mountains when she was a teen, where she learned a lot of ghost stories she passed on to me when I was young.
I’ve been drawing all my life, but only started painting recently.
I first tried to paint the style of landscapes I loved best- the same ones my father loved- impressionist renderings of the southwest. We loved Wilson Hurley; my father gave me a framed Wilson Hurley print when I went to college. But I also loved Ed Mell’s art-deco inspired landscapes, and I’ve always loved the comics- Peanuts and Bloom County, B.C. and Tumbleweeds.
I think I’m trying to put all this together: Hurley and Mell and Charles Schultz.
I majored in Architecture for a while, back when we still had to learn to draw to be architects, where drawing meant trying to share how space was organized, what the layers were, and how it gets used. Training in that particular kind of drawing is in me, too, and is part of how I paint.
A few years ago, as my style evolved, people started saying they saw ‘joy’, in my work, and I’ve decided to lean into that, to let that joy into my paintings and give it room to grow.