I spend a majority of my free time exploring the Northeast’s wilderness areas. I may have acquired this passion for the great outdoors from my father who fished and explored near his home on the NY side of Lake Champlain in the Adirondacks into his twenties. With his long professor’s summer breaks we later as a family went around searching out great hikes, fishing and skiing places. Inspiration to this day for me comes from either forays into the wild places or memories of those early trips. My work may be imbued with the special feeling of discovery or enlightenment in the grips of cross-country running, hiking and skiing, whitewater canoeing or snorkeling.

I believe that great art seeks in novel ways to resolve tensions in ways that evoke strong feelings. I love the simplicity and the clarity of my mission which is the inventing of new ways to show balance, strength and harmony. To get there I set up difficult problems such as how to show twisting, dynamic rock, metal or wood forms that each counter balance another form’s weight and direction.

To make my work feel relevant and necessary I feel I have to make a contribution to what sculptural problems I can resolve. I have tried to overcome the sculptural challenges of joining materials of stone and wood as can be seen in my work in this show. The bands of steel took many years to work out as ways to hold my sculptural forms together. This contribution echoes my desire to have the sculpture hold up in the air objects much like a living person would and say “here look”.

The bronze figure in the show “Man in the Wave” speaks of the tensions of holding up in the world. The pose purposefully seems difficult and yet at peace. I think of the figure as immersed in an ocean wave at the moment it crashes down over him. To make a bronze requires a long time and process from idea to finished piece. I want to show that the freshness of an idea can be maintained and delivered untrammeled and glistening even with this obstacle.

My creations show many paths coming together. The two of them I want you to see in the sculptures most are the moment of inspiration and then the fulfilling of that promised vision with the lightness of the original idea intact.

I have continually searched for the connections between my art and the public places in which it is put. In my art I investigate nature and human nature in public places. The natural beauty in the everyday can be seen in my reuse of second hand metal objects to depict human features. My work is loved by children because it has much in common with the children’s games where children use what is available to imitate the adult world using brooms, toys and crayons as substitutes for guns, cars or traditional art. Adults, likewise, who use tools, get a lesson in recycling as reused metal objects or stray rocks become the substitutes for normally very serious artist’s materials like cast bronze, marble and exotic woods.

Commercial objects brightly painted to stand out show up everywhere in our modern world. They start to substitute for natural objects in our minds. Maybe my need to describe a “hybrid of nature” in art comes from the emerging situation in which differences between nature and man-made objects have become disconcertingly negligible and this requires the artist to clear up the confusion by drawing a light on the problem of the lost innocence of nature due to our commercial and popular cultures’ intrusions.