In general I would characterize my work as being organic and minimalistic.
Meditation on the curved line and expressing motion in a static sculpture constitute the major themes of my work. The potential of the single line or the undulating mixture of multiple curves to express emotions and relate to the natural world seems limitless.
I strive to create art that reflects and amplifies the natural world. Much of humanity attempts to reshape the natural world into understandable and controllable forms. So angles and squares supplant the undulating curves of the organic world. We are defiant against the natural order of this place in which we find ourselves and that defiance is our epitaph.
My work is intuitive and springs from a churning inside of me and from my observation of the natural world ~ a world that humans seem hell bent on subduing, an ultimate impossibility as the tides and rivers and twisted tree branches within each individual have an immutable claim on us.
While I am strongly drawn to the streamlined, simple flowing forms of Art Deco, it is Art Nouveau which is most closely aligned with my own sensitivities. In the process of distilling down the intricate organic designs, I strive to create sculptures that remain recognizable while leaving enough vagueness in the design for observers to make their own interpretation and emotional investment.
I have been fascinated with by the Futurist painters and their ability to convey a sense of movement in static objects. This has been a significant influence.
I find the works of Brancusi, Paul Manship, and Ferdinand Preiss among many others, very appealing. I feel a vague connection with David Smith in as much as we both learned our welding skills in an industrial setting (Smith in a Studebaker plant), like him I often lay my work out on my shop's floor for welding and our affinity for placing sculptures around our property and photographing them also connect us though little else does.
In Lindsey, a small village in northwestern Ohio, I grew up a 100 feet from a blacksmith shop. I would spend hours setting on the floor watching the crotchety old smithy hammering red hot metal on an anvil and sharpening plow points amid long arcs of golden sparks.
Beginning my collegiate years at Bowling Green State University intending to be an architect, I first experimented with plaster of Paris over a wire armature and soldering small strips of steel into tornado shaped sculptures.
Early on I was strongly drawn to the social sciences and abandon my original educational goals. After graduation I moseyed on east to upstate New York and became a caseworker for Child Protective Services. There I was confronted by a world and experiences that heretofore I had barely imagined. It is a difficult and emotionally challenging profession and one which left a profound impression upon me.
Drifting down to Connecticut I found work welding on submarines. With the first smell of grinding metal amid a shower of golden sparks I was taken back through time to the old blacksmith shop. After a 2 year apprenticeship I became a first class pipe weldor. Working in the shipyard among 15,000 men and women, I encountered a rough and tumble world and a diversity of personalities that was mind boggling. Creating some small sculptures with my newly acquired skills foreshadowed what was to be.
Heading north to a small town near Burlington, Vermont I started a welding business. Then in 1999 some 34 years after I left behind my original experiments with sculpture, I took it up again in earnest using skills acquired in building machines of war and a sympathy for the pathos of life gleaned from social work.
My work has been described as being lyrical and as drawing in space with my sculptures expressing movement in a static form such as my Gates series. Also appealing to me is the beauty of asymmetrical numbers or elements such as 5, 7, 9 and 17. I have explored body language in a group of minimalistic life size works. The endlessly fascinating relationship between men and women has provided inspiration for a few spheres.
What fundamentally is at the core of my creativity, and where ultimately does inspiration come from, remain an elusive question for me. I am in the camp with the likes of Igor Stravinsky who was quoted as saying that he was merely a vessel through which the music passed. Henry Miller elaborated writing, "Who Is Original? Everything That We Are Doing, Everything That We Think, Exists Already, And We Are Only Intermediaries, That’s All, Who Make Use Of The Currents Which Are In The Atmosphere, In The Cosmos.
There is, of course, much mysticism and magical thinking in this view of the universe and art in particular but one none-the-less to which I adhere.
As a corollary I would add that the artist is only in a slightly better position to express and define what their work is about than anybody else. It has been my experience that an individual's interpretation of my sculptures have sometimes been richer, deeper, and more meaningful than anything I intended. And certainly just a valid. Isn't that a wonderful thing about art!!
