I am a classically trained visual artist, having studied drawing and painting at SUNY Purchase and The School of Visual Arts in NYC from 1987-1989. I grew up surrounded by fine art and artists in NYC in the mid to late 1970's. My mother, Frances Lassiter, was founder and chairman of the fine arts department of New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, Long Island. My parents, Norman and Frances Lassiter, produced screen prints for many premiere fine artists of that time and I personally was able to visit artist homes and studios as a child. Being able to visit the studios of Jasper Johns, Romare Bearden, Leroy Neiman, Red Grooms and Richard Anuskiezwicz made a powerful and lasting impression upon my outlook on fine art and the fine art process.

I began my career in broadcast television in the early 1990's and this led to my experimentation with video as a medium in the mid to late 1990's. Now I express myself in oil paintings that capture the feeling and textures of the many places I have traveled. I use a combination of memory and photographs to create a synergy of time and place to reproduce the "feeling" of scenes that have impressed me over the years. Painting allows me to combine particular landscapes with different times of day that are impossible for me to produce through photographs. The majority of the landscapes I paint are from personal travel experiences from 2003 to the present. I hope to achieve an intensity through the texture and color of physical paint on canvas that can be seen in artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh.

My wife and I moved to Mid Missouri in 2006 and I have become more and more impressed with the beautiful landscapes we are surrounded by in this area. There's an incredible quiet and tranquil beauty of a fog covered hayfield on a winter Missouri morning. My work seeks to reproduce the feelings of these moments through paint as opposed to the "literal" images produced through photography. I have become more concerned with the process of expression through the creation of images rather than the process of taking photographs over the years.