In 1965, I began making sculptures on Cape Cod out of leather scraps from the sandal shop where I worked. When I moved west two years later, I visited the Watts towers in Los Angeles and the junk assemblages in the mud flats across the bay from San Francisco and my eyes opened to the art materials that are everywhere, which I began turning into whimsical constructions on empty lots and beaches.
I love old ramshackle wooden structures with their lean-tos and additions, especially barns with weathered gray siding and red trim. Rather than re-coloring anything, I prefer to work with the palette I find, so I always have an eye out for broken down farm buildings where I can scavenge fragments.
While living in the west, I fell in love with the raw beauty of the mountains and the desert. I was particularly drawn to un-restored ghost towns and the remnants of the mines they had grown up around where I found rusted metal with a reddish tone not seen in damper climates and deeply grained shards of wood which had hardened with age in the dry air.
Painted pieces of wood which have been tumbled to perfection under water are among my favorite materials. A recycler by nature, virtually everything I use in my art has had a previous life – bobbins, chair spindles, tool handles, toy blocks, croquet sets and wooden patterns from steel mills. They’re spread throughout my studio so I can see as many as possible at a glance. I constantly move them around making different combinations on my worktables until I’m satisfied with an assemblage.
My work grows out of the bits and pieces I’ve collected and from my sense of how they fit together in pleasing patterns. I strive for rhythm and balance expressed in purely abstract compositions. There are no recognizable symbols or figures, nor are there any hidden concepts or meanings.
My fondness for the rustic is reflected in my lifestyle which includes living in an early period style house I designed and helped build on a piece of property I carved out of the woods to accommodate my earth-bound efforts at landscaping, poultry/game bird farming and forest management.
As an importer of hand-crafts and artifacts, antique Asian furniture and natural-dyed Oriental rugs, my business meshed nicely with other aspects of my life having furnished me with the resources to constantly rearrange my surroundings to suit my evolving tastes.
I wouldn’t be able to stop fiddling with my environment if I wanted to. A meeting of passion and profession brought me a sense of harmony and fulfillment that was years in the making – a testament to the notion that it is never too late to nurture the creative spirit and drive that is inherent in all of us.
The idea that art arises out of need, lack and deprivation hit home for me the first time I drove through a wind-chiseled canyon in Colorado. Who needs sculpture when you can look at this, I remember thinking. But as soon as it was out of sight a desire arose in me to fill the void.
