About Me
In a fluid therapeutic journey, I heal through luminist oil painting and sharing the process with others through a relationship rooted in quality craftsmanship, experimentation, and emotions laid bare. I strive to provide affordable fine art to lower-income individuals who want to benefit from the therapy art provides.
I want to share my art with you
I stare into a canvas oil painting, my field-trip chaperone warning me not to get too close even though I want to walk through into the oil. The expanding landscape, misty valley, and bright sun made me feel liberated from my life trapped in my low-income existence and insecurities as a boy. This painting simultaneously scared and delighted me: freedom was not at my disposal, yet borrowing it from this painting somehow brought temporary relief.
Researching for my thesis on fin-de-siècle American literary naturalism to complete a Masters degree in English Literature, my eyes halted on a sentence in Immanuel Kant’s 1781 A Critique of Pure Reason: “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime [as in that which causes an emotion of fear] is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.” I was transported back to that forgotten museum where I failed to unlock the shackles of my life but delighted in the prospect and attempt. A handful of years teaching college reading, writing, and literature and a challenging career change later, the paint brush, saw, and wrench ended up being the key to my freedom.
- The Beautiful and the Sublime -
I paint inspired by American luminism and intrigued by the way emotions of joy and fear—Kant’s beautiful and sublime—interact in the landscape, the intricacy of controlling as much of the material process as possible, and the anxiety and depression therapy this interplay provides. I started oil painting in my mid-thirties, teaching myself through imitation and experimentation before beginning formal instruction in the atelier method under Ali Ghassan at the ARC-certified REAL Academy of Art Colorado.
My early socio-economic conditions, struggles with anxiety and depression, and journey through a short career as an English instructor shape me as an artist, and I strive to create affordable artwork for people throughout the socio-economic spectrum. Toward this mission, I also donate part of my art proceeds to Food Bank of the Rockies to help others have a better chance of finding a way out of whatever confines them.
Please contact me if you have questions or are interested in purchasing my art.
Along with my philosophy concerned with affordable art and creating as much of the artistic process as possible, my wife Rosalia and I started Lotspeich Art Works in 2021, a cottage business that produces hand-crafted artist tools, canvases, and picture frames at discounted prices for local artists and art students.