In 2001 the sheet that hung beside his paintings at Aroma introduced him as “an untrained full-time artist who has been painting from his studio in the Washington, DC neighborhood of Adams Morgan since 1994.” A classified ad that August called him an “Adams Morgan boy.”
His artist statement for the Corcoran show that May described the room: “I enjoy the smell of linseed oil and turpentine as I paint in my efficiency apartment. The way I can count on my favorite brushes to pull off any painting without looking too muddy.”
He moved into the building in 1991 and first painted at the kitchen table of his own apartment, the same table where he shot his first film, “Seize the Day,” in April 1993. In 2000 he bought a second unit in the same building as a dedicated studio. To make room there he pulled out the oven and the dishwasher; The Washington Post wrote about it in 2009 (“Many young professionals take location over space”). From October 2004 he opened the door for dozens of open studios, until he moved downtown in March 2017.
From the window he watched the city. On the morning of September 11, 2001 he photographed the smoke rising from the direction of the Pentagon. Every last Sunday in October the Señor de los Milagros procession, the Lord of Miracles of Washington’s Peruvian community, passed below; it still sets out from the Shrine of the Sacred Heart nearby. Inside, the walls, the floor, the furniture and the painter all wore the same paint.
