Founder of Altamira

I love to create things from scratch and drive them through to completion. I also love art. As a kid, my aunt owned a gallery in Basalt. I spent summers with my grandparents in nearby Aspen so spent a lot of time in the gallery. I was fascinated by how the business worked and of course the art. Seeing this they started my collection by giving me my first piece for my 10th birthday. I still have that piece.

Prior to Altamira, I spent 8 years at Clique Studios, a top national design firm headquartered out of Chicago. There I started as a UX designer then transitioned to launching and managing new offices.

In 2013 I helped launch the Chicago Venture Summit, sitting on the steering committee until 2021.

From 2017-2019 I taught a class on web design at The University of Chicago Graham School.

Nude and Naked Art on Altamira

Nakedness and art have been a pair since the dawn of art. The greeks were obsessed, renaissance artists made it a focal point, and Fransisco Goya brought nudity into the modern era by blurring of the line between the naked and the nude with La Maja.

For me, naked art evokes our humanity by stripping away the external shell that shapes identity and differentiates us from other animals, so I like it. I was first exposed to nudity in art by my grandparents. These were my dad's parents who were not very into art but had two works of nude women. One was a carved wooden sculpture while the other was a painting. By most standards, they were not very good, but I was fascinated by them. I was a boy so at first, it was because they represented something forbidden, and they were just out in the open. As I grew older I began to appreciate how they represented raw human emotion. There was nothing to distract away from the humanity of the subject.

Today, nude art remains one of my favorite subjects. The raw emotion embedded and solicited by it is tough to match. Below are some of my favorite nude artworks on Altamira.

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