Artist Statement

My journey to sculpture and painting has been anything but direct.

I have always had a need to express myself through a variety of media. Early on this mostly took verbal form. Writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Writing a novel The Morning Road, (Micah Publications,1978.) Writing short stories and some poetry. Then there was a gap of perhaps twenty years as I focused on a career as an executive in the financial services. Well you can’t keep it down forever and at midlife (that’s my mid-fifties) I felt “stuff” roiling around inside me.

I enrolled in a sculpture workshop and all the stuff seemed to spill out into stiff awkward forms. Fortunately I had a patient teacher in Roger Junk and over time the three dimensional bronze forms began to more directly reflect what I was trying to express. 

After several years I turned to painting and drawing under the belief that in order to grow as an artist I needed to learn this fundamental language of the visual arts. Again, I was fortunate to come under the tutelage of Tim Harney, a wonderfully gruff but penetrating artist and teacher. He pushed me to honor the integrity of the discovery process through the visual medium. He taught me that creating is as much about the truthfulness of the journey as it is about the outcome.

Most recently I have been wrestling with the question:  How do you paint memory? 

My interests continue to center on the human being in the context of personal memory and story. I try to get below the surface. This has led me to experiment at the edges of abstraction and direct representation. My quest is to convey narrative through the collision between abstraction and representation.