Modern Masters: Cincinnati, OH

“I would definitely call what I do Pop Art. I take the very familiar and make it attractive and interesting by adding splashes of color — and then I do it again and again. Colorful, beautiful, repetitive. My crying Supergirl is the art for which I’m best known, but I try to keep finding new imagery. What you see a lot of when you go to Pop Art galleries is people who always have their Marilyn, always have their Roy Lichtenstein pen dots…I try not to recycle from the past.

I started investing in art as a student at the University of Cincinnati. Then in 1989 I saw that Andy Warhol’s brother, Paul Warhola, who had a successful scrap metal business, was embarking on a painting career. We had a mutual acquaintance so I drove to see him in on his chicken farm in Pennsylvania. As I was talking to him, he got to understand my knowledge of Andy and of the arts and asked me to help with launching his work. I dropped out of UC for a year and a half and managed his career — painting concepts, promotions, PR; we did an Absolut Warhol ad. One of the people who bought a painting was Steve Jobs, who at the time owned Next Computers in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t believe it.

Paul stopped making art, so I went back to Cincinnati and got my degree. Eventually I started making my own paintings and silkscreens. I was involved in promoting a well-known nightclub called Club Clau, and I sort of became its art director. Art was a big part of the club, and people would buy paintings off the wall. That’s when I started my Supergirl series, which was very popular — Paris Hilton and Tara Reid are two collectors. I’ve sold well over 400 canvases now of my leading Supergirl, but people almost don’t even look at the image anymore; they look at how the color is and how it will sit in their house. I like my paintings to be visual magnets. I want you to walk into the room and be drawn to my artwork."

How did your landscape series start?

I was looking for something new to do and a lot of people wanted landscapes. But everyone does landscapes, I couldn’t figure out how to do them in a new way. So my thought was to go old — find images that are old and rare, break them apart, re-polarize them and pop them out with color. and Cincinnati is renowned for four specific landmarks. I started with Fountain Square. I didn’t use silk screening, I was digitizing and breaking apart images, power packing an old sepia tone poster to make it exciting again.

What other pieces in the sale are you proud of?

One I really, really like is the portrait “Gold Paavo,” of Paavo Jarvi, a famous European symphony conductor. They’re considered Mick Jagger level over there. Something else that’s really personal to me is the collection of REM singles. I had a good relationship with the band, and some of these pieces actually came from their prize closet in their office in Athens, GA in the nineties.