Modern50

My artistic background started out in Baltimore City drawing tanks, making tiny ship models, and building fly jails out of wine bottle corks with my Dad. Later, I was able to gain admission to a local commuter college and enrolled in art classes o...
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My artistic background started out in Baltimore City drawing tanks, making tiny ship models, and building fly jails out of wine bottle corks with my Dad. Later, I was able to gain admission to a local commuter college and enrolled in art classes on and off for 8 years. As the college career wound down, a great high school friend got me a gig that turned out to be a 12 year career as a digital illustrator, designer and iconographer at AOL. The creative types I met there were incredible. I had never experienced anything like it, it was the art school experience, I never had. My college career was not “mentally” stimulating, the setting was just too distracting. But the commercial artist gig really changed how I viewed myself, my work, my talents, etc. All the people I worked with over the years made me feel very talented and creative, they really gave me the confidence to continue to strive for a life in the arts. A co-worker of mine turned me on to the value and prevalance of mid-century furnishings, and reselling ideas. We’d go shopping, hitting local dealer warehouses, looking for free waste, discarded value, dumpster diving. It felt like freedom, like money could be made out of thin air. In 2001 after a year abroad I painted and really committed myself to my art work. But it was frustrating, I couldn’t find the art scene in DC. I was really attached to my paintings, they were more cathartic exercises and personal journals than commodities. But the vintage stuff was different, less personal, my efforts were really appreciated, it was diverse, exciting, infinite. And I was making sculpture from the items collected in thrift stores, estate sales and the trash. So in 2003 we built Modern50 in php with an AOL coder dude. But after a few months or so the partnership fizzled and I bought the domain and ran the site by myself and it always remained a constant vehicle for collecting, learning and dealing. I loved it and my artist friends were calling me a “Merchant!” My girlfriend moved out and said I had an "eBay Addiction!" Things were bleak from their point of view, but to me it was the path to everything, it felt right. My art studio was full of modern furnishings, salvage projects, and money was coming in and going out, I loved it. In the spring of 2008 Eric and I started working together again. We widened our scope, I trusted my instincts fully now, and reinvention and creativity led the way, it was a different way of looking at vintage. We Geared things more to the artistic side. Stopped doing the things we dreaded and replaced them with more energetic duties. For instance, I always spent time in the product photography, so when I let myself play there people reacted and bought. I procured certain things just to photograph them, or take them apart. Eric built the Factory20 site, and I put the Modern50 site into the same template, we mirrored content and motored for three years, it was great, some of my quietest gut instincts led the way, and clients from NYC and the West Coast were picking up on it. But as quickly as it started, three years later it ended. And since this past July 2011 Factory20 and Modern50 completely cut ties and are no longer working to together. So keep checking in to the www.Modern50.com website for a new and more original creative direction, from my new location in Paint Branch, Maryland.