Saks Fifth Avenue
I began freelancing with Saks Fifth Avenue in 1996, my senior year at Parsons School of Design. I like to call the ten years I spent regularly working there "Visual Bootcamp", because it was a rigorous production schedule, and I learned so much! This photo above is from 2012 when my artwork was featured in their celebrated 5th Avenue windows for the second time. Following are more photos of that occasion, as well as the first time I had my still life paintings featured in the 5th Avenue windows during Armory Week in 2006, and the signature toile fabric I illustrated in 2005, part of which ran as a full page advertisement in the NY Times.
Hermès
Equipped with the production skills and personal connections that I had acquired from my colleagues and experiences doing window display at Saks Fifth Avenue, I then started to get calls to do specific painting projects for other fashion companies, such as Hermès, Donna Karan, Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss, Hickey Freeman, Chanel, Ferragamo, and Urban Zen. Here I am in 2015 painting a backdrop for Fall Hermès windows designed by artist Ruby Wescoat. Below are photos of just a few of the numerous jobs I have done for Hèrmes.
Donna Karan Collection
The great thing about working for fashion companies like Donna Karan Collection is that they have a strong, clear vision, which I get to play off of in creating works of art that I wouldn't normally make on my own with materials that I wouldn't generally use. For example, these abstract paintings pictured above were inspired by the clothing line at the time and are made not only with paint, but tissue paper as well. Below are installation shots of these paintings, as well as some other showroom and window projects, including one of the large black linen with gold leaf canvases that turned me on to using gold leaf in my own still life drawings and paintings.
Urban Zen
Me and the woman behind Urban Zen, Donna Karan
In collaboration with the Urban Zen designers, I have created various series of abstract paintings inspired by the season's fashion line for the store in the West Village. Below are images for two such series.
Pure DKNY
In 2007, I had the good fortune of being flown to San Francisco to paint a Pure DKNY mural on the wall of the Macy's at Union Square. Above is a picture of the mural and below are more images of it, as well as a sampling of other projects I have worked on for Pure DKNY.
DKNY
Throughout the years I have done a lot of work for DKNY. Above and below are images of a particularly fun project, in which I created a painting combing the design of Andy Warhol's Flowers with colors and prints of DKNY fabrics.
Fendi
This was a super fun project in 2011, where I was hired by Twoseven to paint rugs identical to the ones in the Fendi promotional media. The window installation photographs including the one above were taken by Michelle Cheikin, and the screen grabs below were taken from Fendi's website to show the rugs I was copying. I snapped the work in progress images while working on the rugs at Twoseven's awesome factory space.