Franklin, TN

Mixed Media

In my thirty-five years as a studio artists I have explored, experimented, and sought the marrow in very physical, mental and spiritual path to art that I could muster up. I have evolved this life in art, off the grid, so to speak. Coming not out of a university art program, but creating my own way, it was never an intentional attack for the road less traveled or more difficult. It just was, what was created organically over the years.

In order to describe my work today, I must speak of the groundwork from which it grew. I moved to the country in my twenties, and my palette launched broadly and unexpectedly into an unending journey of expansion and invention.

Finding a badly abused piece of land on which to build my studio, I set about to restore the land into something beautiful. Building a hand made house with all doors, stairs, etc. being created like sculpture, while simultaneously creating art, (at this juncture, architectural clay and monumental one of a kind vessels) instigated a diverse and multi-technical vocabulary, this expanded and enlarged upon the foundation of style that had taken root in my work.

That work is a culmination of all these factors. Like the land, texture is and always was, the root of my work. The decoration that I created in order to cover up naïve workmanship when I first started clay at 19 became my style. That style has been interpreted through the sculpture and sculptural painting that I do today. Those first decorative elements have become monumental organic forms, blown up in scale from their early beginnings in clay. My work is lyrical, bold and intricate. I hammer large forms that combine the figure with the forms of trees. Large pod and wing like forms hang and blow in the wind in atriums. Abstract copper forms with complex ponds. Using no molds, no repeating forms, all pieces are one of a kind, reposed, chased and forged in my studio.

In addition to my freestanding sculptures etched and painted sculptural wall pieces continue to evolve. They are complex, dynamic narratives, scaffolding the past to the future.