My adult education began when I studied to be an actor. Shortly thereafter, I worked
as a production assistant in Hollywood. As reality set in, I created a business that enabled me to construct
large-scale art through the design and fabrication of elaborate commercial interiors. This was exciting and
profitable, but ultimately, fairly hollow. For all its merits, it just wasn’t satisfying enough.
After moving to Santa Fe in the late 1980’s, I began to pursue what I suppose I
could call the beginnings of everything. I ate up southwest archaeology and its techniques. I started cave
exploring along the Rio Grande at sites that held some of the oldest and most mysterious mementos of human
development in this hemisphere. I started making my impressions of these studies/adventures in the form of
salable art. I made money, I lost money, I traveled, I learned. Through it all, I kept reaching farther and
farther back to the origins of everything because…well, that’s what interests me.
The search took on another dimension when I started working in applied metals. I
constructed iconic shields, of sorts, that were both symbols of the origin of consciousness and emblems of
aspiration. Their vocabulary was the power of silence; their purpose, to strip away the casualness with which
we experience the world around us. Their power was in their deceptive simplicity.
After all this, I went back to what had interested me in the early 1970’s,
writings like The Tao of Physics. I realized that it wasn’t a place or a style or a history that I was
seeking, but a state of being. The language of that state was the language of science and spirituality and
art. My goal, I realized, was to create works of art that radiated a presence that was visually stimulating,
physiologically interactive, and spiritually evocative, embodying in their static state our active desire for
mystery and resolution.
My newest works are about time, about the simplicity inherent in complexity, and
about the magic that lies hidden just below the surface of life. The Greeks, who named everything, named this
as well. Opathe: to make the invisible visible. It is the goal of every serious artist, scientist, and
writer: unbridling the unseen, unearthing the undiscovered, unleashing a great tempest of the heretofore
unexpected.
I now have a large studio and fabrication shop in Silver City, New Mexico. From my
back porch I can see Mexico and Arizona. At night I have a splendid view of infinity.
I hope that by doing this work with all my heart that I somehow will make a
difference.
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