Following academic accomplishments in art and archaeology in the 1970s and 80s, I learned to balance my art interests with a rewarding career as a professional archaeologist working throughout the American southwest. During this period I combined my love of sculpture and my avid interest in Southwestern cultures and landscapes to create unique images in cast bronze.
As a native westerner, early in m career I focused on “Cowboy and Indian” realism. Eventually, my work as an archaeologist began to have a direct impact on my perspective as an artist. Surrounded by amazing natural landscapes, Native American prehistoric structures and primitive art, I began to note the powerful presence of archetypal forms upon which I could pattern my art work. This was an important period of artistic metamorphosis. I found my real passion was not in a realistic end product, but in the character and purpose of the creative process. Today, the primary stylistic focus of my sculpture is an abstraction of these forms, experiences, and landscapes.
My preferred approach is to use a diverse range of metals including bronze, aluminum, steel, copper, brass, and silver. Metals in general have unique qualities that I am fundamentally drawn to - they are malleable, yet highly durable. They can be shaped and formed by hammering, forging, bending, melting, casting, molding, and then finished by painting, polishing and applying a patina. It is this basic metal adaptability that stimulates the subject matter of each body and of work and determines the materials and forms of my sculpture.
Sculpture must be seen, felt and even heard - I love the sounds of different metals clanging and banging together. I absolutely revel in the noise, heat and smoke of metal casting. Bronze casting is one of the oldest techniques in sculpture, used as a medium to give permanence to materials like clay or plaster. Foundry work is an essential part of my artistic processes.
If my work does not stimulate intellectually and emotionally, then I have failed to achieve my artistic goals. I am not overtly attempting to trace resemblances to known forms or objects, but rather to create the pure beauty of form and design and the interplay of mass, movement, sound and three dimensional space. While I use a variety of materials and processes in each piece, my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between my different sculptures, they are always linked by recurring formal conceptions. There is a necessary exaggeration of relationships between my metallic mediums and the planes and forms that I use to create, at times, an unintended impression of a semi-association with animals and human forms.