I was raised in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, and lived for for 10 years in Rome, Italy, where I majored in English literature. There I met the likes of Irish poet Desmond O'Grady, a former assistant to Ezra Pound who mentored me during my formative years as a poet and painter.
I traveled extensively, particularly to Germany, France, Spain and the Czech Republic. I worked as a translator and was an English teacher at several high schools in Rome.
I was also a U.S. federal officer before becoming a journalist.
My first retrospective, "Night of the backstreet brawler," was held in 2006 in Palm Springs; a poetry collection, "Postcards from the tattooed man's chest," will be on bookshelves in mid 2007.
Though many of my abstract pieces gravitate toward the organic, much of what I do is the result of experimentation, and involves a great degree of figuration and commerce with found materials and household items commonly found in hardware stores, such as latex, enamels, and cardboard, which I often use in grittier works such as my “arrest” series, which documents a Kafkaesque trial in the post-Sept. 11 world.
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