Self-portrait
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I am a multidisciplinary artist. I sculpt, paint, and draw. I don’t want to make the same kind of art over and over just so people can immediately recognize it as mine. Innovation is at the core of my creative process. I often work in series, using each one to explore different subjects and ideas.
My work is generally social, environmental, and mystical. The social concerns matters that affect people and society. The environmental reflects my concern with the impact of human activity on the natural world. The mystical is harder to define. It is the hidden meaning in the work-the part that may not be immediately understood or even explained. I believe a work of art should try to have “Soul”.
I spent my youth moving up and down the West Coast with my Naval military family. Later, as an art student at the University of California, Fresno, I was fortunate to participate in the guest artist-in-residence program. There, I studied under artists, including Richard Artschwager, Bob Grosvenor, Judy Chicago, Sam Gilliam, Richard Nonas, Stephen Antonakos, Charles Gaines, and Allen Bertoldi.
After receiving my MFA in sculpture, I completed the fabrication and installation of a 60-ton, six-unit, cast concrete sculpture titled “Sweet Sixteen”. It still stands on the university campus today.
SWEET SIXTEEN, 1974
60-ton cast concrete. The University of California, Fresno, CA
13’ 10” (H) x 16’ (W) x 23’ (L)
Grosvenor and Artschwager encouraged me to move to New York City, and in 1976 I did. I built a studio in a downtown TriBeCa loft where I lived, made art, exhibited my work, and helped raise a family for 25 years.
In those crazy, early years, I witnessed and participated in the rebirth of downtown New York and its art scene.
I was influenced by the Dadaists, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Robert Morris, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, H. C. Westerman, and Richard Artschwager, among others.
My family lived in the 9/11 “Ground Zero” zone, and the windows of our top-floor loft faced the Twin Towers. Before that tragedy, the Towers had occasionally appeared in my artwork. Looking back, some of those works seemed strangely prophetic in both their imagery and timing. Examples include the 1995 cover of The Sciences magazine and my 1988 painting “Up the Hudson”, in which the Hudson River is turned blood red.
1995 The Sciences magazine
UP THE HUDSON, 1988
68" (H) x 55" (W) x 18" (D), mixed media, frame by artist
GROUND ZERO Landscape, NYC #1, 1988
8" (H) x 8" (W), India ink on paper target sheet
Before the Towers came down, I had begun a series of nine paintings that I intended to show in my next solo exhibition. Everything changed after 9/11. The images I had started as daylight scenes gradually became nighttime scenes. That work became the beginning of what I called the “Anti-Series.”
These paintings were my response to violence, war, radical extremes, and the art market. It also contributed to a period of self-exile and my reluctance to show my work publicly.
Times have changed. I am exploring new ideas and new ways of working, including technology, electronics, computer PDFs, CNC machines, lights, and sounds, all generated from my original handmade drawings.
Creating new, innovative art is very challenging and never easy. Fear can be very scary when it comes to creativity.
But therein lies the adventure: the effort to uncover something original and the “rush” of thinking you’ve made a new discovery.
When a finished artwork leaves my Studio, something changes that is hard to define. It’s the separation. Part of me doesn’t want to let go, for various reasons.
On the other hand, I always thought that if a work of art is finished and shown, it should be for sale.
It becomes a potential marketable item with a price tag. Who speaks for that item?
Does the artist have to explain “what does it mean”? Can a work of art stand on its own without a specific definition?
Age-old questions that I have never successfully answered.
It’s going to be a very interesting future for us all.