Artist's Statement & Biography

As an artist, my goal is to use and share my God-given artistic ability to lift the spirits and bring joy and delight into the lives of my viewers, patrons and aspiring artists from all walks of life.

I share with them my interpretation of the infinite variety and order found in nature. I also strive to interpret interrelationships of geometrical shapes and voids, and the sensuous merging of fluid organic shapes with color, texture and visual balance. I often combine synthetic and natural materials in the same piece in a symbiotic blend and strive for perfection of the shape and details of the surface finish. These imaginative concepts motivate me now as they have done throughout my sculpting endeavors over the past fifty years.

I was born in Chicago in 1939 and reared in Oak Park, Illinois. I am entirely self taught as an artist, having only taken art classes in high school. I learned the fiberglass fabrication trade in the early 1960's and, at about the same time, discovered rigid polyurethane foam. I learned to carve the foam into free form shapes, covered them with fiberglass and then experimented with various surface treatments.

I delight in my ability to express my feelings of pleasure, adventure and spontaneity by crafting beautiful shapes from blocks of raw foam, wire, cloth, liquid polymers and other materials. Constant experimentation plus shared experiences with other artists, craftspeople and friends has provided me with the stimulation I need to create three-dimensional objects of beauty. However, my work has recently undergone a metamorphosis, and I now use scrap materials such as metal shavings, ground glass, sawdust, sand, coal dust, key filings, scrap wire, Styrofoam packaging and a multitude of other materials to transform them into exciting, beautiful sculpture. This process is environmentally friendly and cost effective. No one viewing the finished product would suspect the raw materials used anymore than one would believe that a beautiful butterfly was once a frightful-looking caterpillar. My early interest in using this rather unusual combination of materials was mainly due to its unlimited potential for creating shapes, but the sculptures produced with these materials are also relatively low cost, offer ease of fabrication, durable and weather proof, light weight, available in an unlimited size range, easily repaired if needed, and require minimal expense of installation.

I have shared my enthusiasm for creating sculpture by demonstrating the process to children throughout the school system as well as university students, art organizations, senior citizens and nursing home residents.

Not only is my work in the homes and offices of many art collectors, I've had one-man shows throughout the region and have had several large commissions such as the 9.5 foot sculpture I fabricated for the Cornwell-Reed Arts Building on the Oakland City University campus in Oakland City, Indiana. I was also commissioned to make a sculpture for the sculpture garden at Princeton Community High School in Princeton, Indiana, and the Brubeck Center on the Wabash Valley College campus in Mt. Carmel, IL. I continue to show my work throughout the region and am a member of the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana where I was awarded their 2010 Gibson County Arts Award.

In addition to my primary focus on sculpting, I also enjoy ceramic work and photography, mostly of macro photos and flowers and other forms found in nature, which provides me with much of my inspiration for organic sculptural shapes.