When I was seven, after seeing the Boris Karlof movie, Frankenstein, I tried to build my own monster. On our garage floor, I arranged boxes, hoses and various bits of hardware from my father's workbench. This is my first memory of working with my hands--manipulating materials with intent to create an object.

In 1963, at the age of eight, my father took me to the San Mateo fairgrounds for the annual Custom Car and Hot Rod Show. It was the biggest indoor space I had ever been in. There were hundreds of metal-flaked, chromed, chopped,channeled, striped, flamed, far out four wheeled custom built creations everywhere.

Each car had it's own display space; there was angel hair fiber around some of the rear tires that made them look like they were smoking and would wheelie out of the arena at any moment. There were mirrors under some cars reflecting fully chromed undercarriages. There were big and little tires on the same car; some had cheater slicks. I couldn't really focus on any particular car in its entirety, because I was frantically looking for the Big Daddy Roth booth.

Against the back wall, a crowd of teenagers huddled about a small booth where Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth towered above it all. I made my way over to that booth and his recent creation, the baroque and futuristic custom car he called: THE MYSTERION, and nothing has been the same since.

The author Tom Wolfe wrote about Roth in his 1960's cult classic, "Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby". Wolfe called Big Daddy, the Salvador Dali of car customizers, the Walt Disney of weird monster t-shirts and the Andy Warhol of the custom car culture.

Ed Roth inspired a generation of would be artists, like myself, who collected and built his model kits, wore his famous t-shirts or meticulously copied his legendary Rat Fink. Rat Fink remains as one of the most unforgettable icons for the hot rod, surf crazed counter culture of the 1960's.

This attraction, along with Mad magazine, surf beatnicks and Catholic school upbringing initiated my reverent yet cynical attitude. Other influences included television, pop art, consipiracy theories, putting a man on the moon and Woodstock.

I utilize these early influences as imagery and subject matter while the concepts and the content of my work is charged with contemporary relevance.

Garage inventors, hot rod culture and rock n roll fuels the imagery while the content remains open to everything from alcoholism, the Gulf War, identity issues, environmental issues or genetic engineering and cloning.