Influences: The Artists and Ideas Behind My Work

“The Locker Room Gaze”, 24 x 30 x 1.5 in, Acrylic & Mixed Media on canvas (2026) $900.00

My primary work is figurative and rooted in Expressionism, drawing inspiration from artists such as Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Pablo Picasso, and Willem de Kooning. My figurative works are also influenced by the visual immediacy of street art, Naïve Art, and Pop Art. Through bold color, gestural mark-making, and mixed media processes, I construct layered compositions that explore identity, masculinity, vulnerability, fantasy, and human connection through the lens of my experience as a gay man. The male figure remains central to my practice — often distorted, fragmented, or emotionally charged — as a means of examining both personal and collective experiences of selfhood and belonging.

GEORG BASELITZ "Gertrud`s Hut I, 1998" (image source from Lévy Gorvy)

While figurative painting continues to anchor my work, my practice has gradually expanded into broader interdisciplinary and abstract approaches in recent years. Across painting, collage, and material experimentation, I am increasingly interested in surface, texture, and the accumulation of time. Drawing inspiration from weathered urban environments, natural decay, found materials, and digital manipulation, I embrace spontaneity, imperfection, and chance within the creative process. Industrial textures, layered marks, spills, and erosion become visual records of tension, transformation, and endurance.

Below, I want to go deeper into the specific artists and ideas that have shaped how I make work — what I take from each of them, and why.

Georg Baselitz

Baselitz is a lesson in simplicity and unabashed expressiveness. His bold line-making and distorted human figures speak volumes to me — there's nothing hidden or precious about the way he works. I'm especially drawn to the scale of his paintings; standing in front of one, it engulfs you with raw emotion in a way that reproductions never fully capture. What I pull from him most directly is his physical, aggressive, free-flowing painting style — the sense that the mark is a record of the body making it, not just a description of a form.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat's influence comes through his roots in street art and his fearless, unabashed approach to creating. The scribbles and text running through his work add a layer of curiosity to every piece — there's always something to decode, something half-hidden. His color palette is bold and vibrant, loud in its own right, independent of his already loud linework. Beyond the formal qualities, I'm drawn to his identity as an outsider who was, at the same time, deeply fluent in art history — someone who could push against the canon because he understood it.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (image source; The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat)

George Condo

I gravitate toward Condo's later work — the more abstract, cubist-influenced pieces where he expands on Cubism's language while making it entirely his own. What I take from him is that sense of taking an existing visual vocabulary and bending it until it speaks with your own voice. His sense of humor, and his "I don't give a fuck" attitude toward subject matter, sparks a kind of joy and confidence in my own work — permission to let the grotesque and the funny sit in the same painting.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Kirchner's use of color as a source of expression — rather than description — is a huge influence on me, as is his jagged, harshly painted distortion of figures. There's also his historical context: he was an outsider in his own time, and his subject matter was drawn from the everyday grit of city living and nightlife. That's something I connect with directly. Kirchner represents, for me, the core idea of Expressionism itself — painting with emotion rather than representation — and that idea runs through every other artist on this list.

GEORGE CONDO, "RAINY DAY BUTLER (2012)" (Image Source: Sotheby’s) | ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER "SELF-PORTRAIT" (image Source: artprintsondemand) | PABLO PICASSO, “MOUSQUETAIRE A LA PIPE” (Image Source: Sotheby’s)

WILLEM DE KOONING "WOMAN RIDING BICYCLE (1952-1953)" (Image Source: Whitney Museum of Art)

Pablo Picasso

Picasso is an obvious one, but an honest one — he was the first artist whose work I saw as a kid that sparked my interest in modern art in the first place. What influences me most isn't any single period, but his eagerness to keep evolving and his willingness to fight against the norms, including his own. His prolific approach to creating, almost as a daily necessity, is something I aspire to. He was, in the truest sense, unwilling to give a fuck about the rules of the art world, and that pushed boundaries both within the field and within himself.

His later work influences me the most. That's when he really learned that great art comes from within — that retraining yourself to paint like a child again is the ultimate freedom. I love how he broke the human figure apart into abstraction without ever abandoning the figure entirely, never going fully abstract. His work makes you think; it bends your perception of the world around you.

Willem de Kooning

De Kooning became a huge influence the moment I saw his painting Woman on a Bicycle at MoMA. The layers, the unabashed reworking of paint and canvas — every stroke carries a complex, radiating, almost unexplainable energy. What I appreciate most is how he took things a step further than Picasso: he eventually broke free of the figure entirely, letting the strokes of paint take over, while still leaving traces of the figure behind — like a ghost on the canvas.

Street Art, Naïve Art, and Pop Art

Beyond individual artists, I pull heavily from the urban, gritty immediacy and general energy of street art. Alongside that, I draw from Naïve Art — which, in a way, is exactly what Picasso himself was chasing throughout his life: the value of creating without training or rules, and the power of natural self-expression that everyone carries. And then there's Pop Art, which has shaped my work through its use of pop culture as subject matter — an influence that runs through my paintings and eventually sprawls out into my collage series, visible in both my Guerrilla Block work and my Cultural Sediment series. I love the idea of taking commercial or found imagery and reworking it, giving the original image new meaning and a second life.

PHOTO TAKEN BY MYSELF (Image Source: Berlin, Germany) | ROBERT NAVA “Untitled” (Image source: Robert Nava) | ANDY WARHOL "Elvis 1 & 2" (Image Source: WikiArt) | MR BRAINWASH "EVERYDAY LIFE" (Photo Source: Maddox Gallery)

“Urban Sediment #8”, 11 x 14 in (canvas) | 17 x 21 x .5 in (frame) Acrylic & mixed media collage on un-stretched canvas Signed & Dated on back (2026) $285.00

The Sediment Collage Series

My Sediment Collage series expands on my interest in street art, with a particular focus on texture and the historic decay of surfaces that flood urban landscapes. It shares a process with my Guerrilla Block and Cultural Sediment work, but here the focus shifts specifically toward mimicking weathered surfaces — layering in natural, found textures that I photograph directly from the urban streets around me. I merge those photographs into a stained, gritty, abstract canvas, trying to give the original surface a new life and a new look.

At its core, the series is about asking the viewer to take a second look at something that's usually overlooked in the course of a normal day — a crack in a wall, a rusted surface, a patch of decay most people walk past without noticing. Turning that into something worth stopping for is the whole point.

Together, these influences — from the raw physicality of Baselitz and de Kooning, to the outsider identities of Basquiat and Kirchner, to Picasso's lifelong reinvention, to the everyday grit of street art and Pop Art — form the throughline of my practice: a commitment to emotion over representation, to found and weathered materials over pristine ones, and to the human figure as a site where identity, vulnerability, and endurance all meet.