Jeff was born in 1955, which was inconvenient for everyone because the world already had enough children and certainly didn’t need another difficult one. He is the eldest of three, with two sisters orbiting his childhood like moons. His father was a businessman, serious and practical; his mother was artistic, impractical, and creative, which is to say she ruined any chance of him becoming a banker. His grandmother painted, coaxing color onto canvas, and his father and uncles filled their homes with art, one even running a gallery through the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.

As a child, he was gloriously chaotic and rebelliously solitary. He built tall structures out of blocks, erector sets, playing cards, and anything rescued from the trash. If civilization collapsed, he could rebuild it with new stuff, though no one would trust his buildings to stay upright for long, since his civilizations were aggressively attacked by clean-your-room bombs every day. He drew constantly, mostly because paper never argued with him and could be stuffed away before adult judgement showed up.

By adolescence, his inner carnival was in full swing: rock music blared, psychedelic art melted off the walls, and Pop and Op art hypnotized the adults. His grandmother handed him weighty books on the Impressionists, Modernists, and Abstract artists, as if to balance his lava-lamp enthusiasm with some high-minded history. He absorbed both but leaned, predictably, toward the absurd. Romantic notions were lovely, but absurdity had better jokes.

Then, like so many restless dreamers, he wandered. He sailed, he climbed rocks and mountains, he skied down slopes. His degree in biology gave him another set of lenses, ways of seeing time carved into life and landscapes, the long shadow of paleobiology and the immense clockwork of history and science.

At twenty-nine, he married. Four years later came a son, then two years later a daughter, thereby fulfilling the societal checklist quite appropriately. The marriage lasted twenty-one years, long enough to prove both that he could commit and that eventually he’d run out of patience. After the divorce, his suppressed compulsion to create came roaring back, like a long-forgotten debt collector, and he’s been painting ever since.

Now his canvases carry all his lives at once: the chaotic boy, the psychedelic teen, the father, the biologist, the man who climbed mountains and fell off ski slopes. His work remembers the past, questions the present, and quietly mocks the absurdity of trying to make sense of it—which, in the end, is the most and only absurd thing to do with any of this.