ART HAUS

The Ann Arbor Years

By the time I finished, I had a clear idea of what I wanted. I met some great people who wanted to open an art store selling jewelry and trinkets, but that wasn’t my vision. I wanted a gallery with track lighting, grand openings, and art sold right off the wall—meaning canvases. After talking with the owners, we found contractors to install the lighting and paint the walls white, so we could host monthly gallery openings like in the big cities.


You know they call Ann Arbor the biggest little city in the Midwest, and it's true. It was there that I met all these amazing people, and we were able to create new artworks, hold new art openings, and have Chris cross-pollinate a wide range of artistic backgrounds and experiences. The overall result was quite impressive because we had incredible people from across the media, including clay, painting, printmaking, glass blowing, pottery, watercolor, and even the written word. And to top it off, we even had a spoken word theater troupe called Cross Currents.

The result was the Ann Arbor Art Co-op, which lasted for several years. Every month, I saw incredible people come together to share their stories. It was a real adventure and a privilege to meet so many great people. During this time, I started making my own art on canvas, mostly in acrylics, and sometimes in oil.

Much of my inspiration came from pop art, especially Warhol, Lichtenstein, Miró, and Picasso. We worked out of two old studio buildings on Main Street in Ann Arbor. Sometimes, our art openings lasted two whole days and used every floor of both buildings. I sold many original paintings during that time.

I want to make sure I get the record straight because AI tends to elaborate on things that may or may not happen. But it is true: I was really into texture, and into Art Brute. I'm your, as far as making texture happen in my paints by adding sand, gravel, and even cat litter. These are very experimental pieces, but they centered heavily on deep, emotional connections and were delivered in 2D.

A lot of my influences came from pop culture sources like Raw magazine and anything from Fantagraphics Books. This helped my art express complex human emotions in a bold, pop-art, 2D comic-book style. At the time, this direction suited me well and was a big change from what was expected of us in our early twenties. Back then, I wasn’t interested in starting a family or anything like that—art was everything to me.

I met some really awesome filmmakers and started to change my thoughts and feelings about where I wanted to go and end up in life, and for me, that was strictly art-driven. And it was around this time that I helped decorate the interior of the Michigan Theater on Liberty Street in Ann Arbor for the Ann Arbor Film Festival. What a thrill it was to stand there at the top of that grand staircase and tip my hat as all of the festival covers raised their glasses of champagne and wine to me and cheered.

The lobby was decorated with large, hand-painted styrofoam sculptures of characters from my paintings. They hung from the ceiling wires throughout the space. That season’s films came from all over the world, but my favorite was a unique five-minute animation called Kakanya.

It has been one incredible ride, and we're just beginning.

*** I want to make sure these notes are accurate, because in the age of AI, there’s a lot of misinformation about my past. That’s why I took the time to write this myself and set the record straight.