About the Artist
If you are on a path how lost can you be? After a life of admiring artists of all realms, sculpture draws my interest the most.
To be able to touch your work and hold it in your hands... for me is the most satisfying feeling. I enjoy seeing sculptures and thinking, “How did the artist create it? What tools did they use? What light? How long did it take?” I want to touch my work and know it will outlast me.
If my art is made from steel it can be touched, handled, and be three-dimensional. It doesn’t need to be fragile; I would like people to be able to handle my artwork.
One of my faults is that I am frugal and/or I just can’t afford all the materials for some of my crazy ideas. So I look for objects of human fader, trash, something that is destined for the landfill.
Something we can all recognize if we just look a little closer. Seeing what can be turned into something artistic and useful is where my ideas come from.
What is a painting to a blind person? What is music to the deaf? My brother was born blind and identifies the world with his hands. He’s three years older than me and I spent much of my childhood showing him things he could hold and identify. When he was young, he was fascinated with cars and trains, anything that made noise. There was a time when he could identify a car’s make and model just by feeling the shapes and curves. This has been a huge part of why I am drawn to sculpting, the other part is the artist in my family, my father.
My father was a draftsman and boat builder. Everything seemed possible in my father’s hands. I can remember being so amazed that you could take a one-dimensional drawing and turn it into a sailboat made of wood and fiberglass. In the boat shop that my father worked and managed, I had exposure to the tools and materials that could create what my mind envisioned.
Both my mother and father always supported my creativity. Their encouragement to use the tools that might normally scare a preteen kid gave me the confidence to move forward with an idea. Anyone that can allow a child to create with good direction builds imagination. It was natural for me to want to create and use that side of my mind with that influence as a child.
When I see artwork there’s a part of me that wants to touch it and hold it, even dry paint on a painting says touch me.
As a young teenager, I made my first surfboard out of an old broken surfboard. The feeling I had at the time was that somewhere inside that block of foam was a surfboard that needed to be free.
It is quite satisfying to make something out of nothing - nothing being an old barbecue or some trash that can be reassembled, reconfigured, and turned into something new. Creating something that can raise an eyebrow or make a smile is really all I’m trying to do.
One of the hardest things for me as an artist just to create the same thing over and over. As I’m working on one thing my mind is almost always inventing something else, sometimes this can be such a distraction then I’m doing two or three things at once.
I think half of the things I create are made from upcycled material, this can be a problem because you end up hoarding scrap metal and broken things. The other half is made from new material, easier to start with but sometimes not as satisfying.