About my work

My compositions are meant to stir a viewer's visual taxonomy—to activate and remix notions of imagery and meaning. I use archetypal abstract forms and illusory ground constructions to create a framework for self reflection and discovery. My hope is that others will engage with the work as I have, sharing both a common and personal experience.

The digital works I make are created from scratch “by hand” on a personal computer. The processes include digital facsimiles of drawing, painting and collage, as well as darkroom techniques like compositing, enlargement and color filtering. Many steps and layers are combined to create each unique image. My traditional paintings and constructions are made using similar techniques creating pathways between the contexts of digital and analog mediums.

I’ve produced thousands of original works and composites since the mid ‘80s. Only a few are viewable on this website. Please contact me for access to specific works or the complete catalog.

About me

My parents were both talented professional artists. My mother, Emily Stom Nendza, was a fashion illustrator for many years back when newspaper advertising was done by artists with ink and wash. She taught me to draw figures and had a beautiful illustrative style. My father, Arthur Nendza, started his career as a stained glass window artist. He later became a photo retoucher using the airbrush and a designer for a flooring company. He had a great eye for stylization, texture and pattern. When he retired, he became a noted wood and stone sculptor. He showed me how to paint with oils and let me play around with his airbrush equipment. I happily see a lot of my parents' influence in my own aesthetic.

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania that happened to be home to Donnelley Printing Company who was, at the time, the world's largest printing company. It's no surprise then, that my high school had a robust graphic arts program. That's were I spent most of my time in school, running a small press, typesetting, screen printing and playing around in the darkroom.

After high school I enrolled at the York Academy of Art in their commercial art program. After a year there I transferred to the Columbus College of Art and Design. I left there after just a year and in 1983 got my first professional job in the Color Department at Donnelley Printing Company. There I was one of a small group that operated a state-of-the-art digital graphics system called Scitex. It was an ancient ancestor of the modern desktop systems like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and was my first exposure to computers. I was introduced to computer graphic technology just as I was finding my footing as an artist, so my technical skill and my artistic vision developed hand-in-hand.

Sometime around 1985-1986 I made my first digital abstract art. This is about the same time Andy Warhol made his first digital images on an Amiga personal computer. The computers I used were multi-million dollar professional systems and were in operation 24 hours a day most days of the week. There wasn't much time for experimentation but I did manage to create a few pieces back then using virtually the same techniques I still use today. The printing business underwent a huge and very rapid change in the early 1990's when desktop computers became powerful enough to do professional graphics work. I was at the forefront of what was called the "desktop revolution" at the time. This gave me access to early custom-built Apple Macs and the first versions of Adobe Photoshop. I was a partner in a digital imaging business in San Jose, CA where I set up and operated the Silicon Valley’s first fully digital photography studio and I also had access to the first large-format ink-jet printers called Iris. That was in the mid ‘90’s and that’s when my digital art experiments developed to a point where I began to print and show the pieces.

Now I've told you about some of my technology adventures but I haven't told you how I came to love abstraction. In 1978 I went to see a major retrospective of Mark Rothko at the Guggenheim in New York. It changed me. My parents had exposed me to a lot of commercial illustration, technical design and drafting. Not so surprisingly then, my favorite artists were M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali. Rothko's work was the antithesis of what I knew about art. It was powerful and moving. I immediately became a fan of the New York School abstract expressionists. Of course by then, I was about thirty years too late for the AbEx party. But I was, and still am, a fan of those artists and their groundbreaking work.

My first experiments with abstract expressionism were drawings, pastels and paintings but it wasn't long before I began to visualize abstract art on the computer. While I worked on those ancient graphics systems I was exposed to what looked like fragments of some of my favorite artist like Mondrian, Rothko, Diebenkorn and Newman on the screen. Actually, I was seeing highly enlarged graphic images on my screen all day long as I worked as a digital photo retoucher. But it looked very abstract and interesting to me at the time. We're all used to seeing zoomed-up high-resolution images on our personal computers today but you'll have to take my word for it when I say it was pretty novel in 1984. And it inspired me to explore how I would use the computer to create abstract expressionist art.

I found my muse in the computer. My fascination and experience with computers developed simultaneously with my interest in abstract art. The computer allows me to virtually draw, paint, draft and use photographic techniques all at once. It's fast and forgiving. It's clean, quiet and it doesn't' smell bad. I still love the tactile mediums as well, but as one of the early sons of the digital age I feel most free to express my vision with the tools I have grown accustomed to on the computer.

I morphed out of the printing business and into the Internet business when it started to gain popularity in the mid-90's. I've been leading product development and marketing teams for over twenty years now. All the while I've been making art on my computers. I created my first personal website of art in 1998 and this is now my fifth major version. I've had a few solo and group exhibitions over the years and my images have been featured on the covers of several magazines and music CDs. In 2011 I created my first art book entitled "juxta | pose" and produced another in 2013 entitled "Zoom Detail." My latest book published in 2017 is called "Jazz."

I relocated to a small town just outside of Tulsa, OK early in 2021. I'm married with three grown children and I’ve been playing guitars for about as long as I've been making art.

Now you know :)