I am a professional Cartoonist and an Outdoor cat.

I live in this sweet rig with my partner and we drive around to beautiful places. I draw cartoons for the New Yorker Magazine and many other organizations, books and publications. I’m currently working on a graphic novel. And I teach. I’ve walked across Spain, bicycled across the United States and twice walked from Mexico to Canada, thru hiking the PCT and CDT long trails and drawing cartoons the whole time.

I learned to draw in my 20’s

With a background in anthropology and sketch comedy, I had a big, untrained, creative impulse looking for an outlet. My drawing was chicken scratch, but something possessed me to draw a cartoon a day and I fell in love - with the ink, the lines, how the visual brain works with ideas, with the theatricality that required no rehearsal space or cast, with the specificity with which you can pin down an idea if you have the skills.

Cartooning can be blindingly simple - it’s you, your ideas, and a piece of paper. But this only works if you can draw. So for 5 years I scratched feverishly in my sketchbook, hauled stacks of books from the public library, devoured continuing ed classes at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and generally pulled every bootstrap I could find to catch my drawings up to my ideas and be professional about it. I bartended for my bills and depending on the day, did a better or worse job of having faith in myself. I sold my first cartoon to the New Yorker in 2016, after drawing and submitting 247 cartoons.

This is why I love teaching adults. I deeply know the bitter frustrations and sweet rewards of figuring yourself out as an artist. I created the Kitchen Table Atelier , an online teaching workshop to help people develop themselves as artists, to support adults going after their artistic ambitions and so I can have ongoing relationships with students even while leading a footloose, traveling life.

It’s a wild thing, to be human. We are a bristling ball of contradictions wrapped in muscles and skin. It’s a situation that is worth a lifetime to ponder, and for me, there is no better tool than drawing for making sense of it, of us and of this world.