Artist's Statement

I have been making things for as long as I can remember. The backyard of my childhood is littered with old lumber, hammers, nails, and holes dug for the hell of it. One of my primary needs as a child was for the bits and pieces of my life to be arranged in a specific way. I remember vividly an array of boats, airplanes, carnival rides, clubhouses, and just plain things that I either made or imagined I would make. There was always an internal struggle to assert my will and my imagination on the external world.

After being selected to attend an intensive art program for advanced 5th and 6th graders, I didn't involve myself in art until I went to college. Art then became a focal point for all my interests, and while I rebelled against the prevailing zeitgeist at the time, something was triggered in me and I managed to survive the university with a degree in fine arts.

Traveling around the west after graduation it slowly dawned on me that my degree was a passport to construction work and manual labor. I attempted to return to the bosom of the university where I assumed I could become a professor and make art in a rarified atmosphere. I failed. My difficulties with intellectual elitism got the better of me. At the same time I began to work in a very good contemporary gallery in Dallas. That exposure and my need to get back to the basics of my childhood ...to put things together, prompted me to quit school, buy tools and go to work.

From the simplicity of the premise that I want to make things I have been forced to tromp around in my internal world, to pursue a path of self-exploration. I have had to decide what, floating inside is worth bringing out, and to find the most efficient way to do that. I have been captivated by Carl Jung's ideas, I have pursued the irrational, the unconscious, and the parts of myself that are hard to grab hold of, and I have somehow made friends with the absurd. I have hacked away at wood, steel and paint looking for some way to grasp the intangible. If this activity can make me happy I assume it is worth doing. The ultimate value of all this I will however have to leave to the experts, and the public.

The resulting journey has been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. To make art, put it in front of the public, and throw one's fate to the wind takes equal parts, faith, self-assurance, and stupidity. Along the way I have stumbled into the education system, stumbled out of it, done well in the gallery system, done poorly in the gallery system, been married, divorced, and remarried, had a child, a heart attack, and a double by-pass. I have faced enough rejections and been accepted to enough things to realize that rationality plays little part in the world of art. As to what is around the corner I truly have no idea, but I still feel a longing to get in the studio, put a few pieces of steel together and see what is waiting to get out.