ABOUT

I'm a fine artist — primarily a sculptor — working in wax and clay from home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I draw almost compulsively. More than a hundred completed sketchbooks, over thirty thousand sketches. It's how I think, how I search, how I find what I'm actually after before I ever touch clay.

What I'm after is something I'd describe as treasure — the thing inside a human being that connects to the spiritual. I believe it's there, in all of us, and I believe the figure is the most honest way I know to go looking for it. Anatomy is my language. So are the symbols I find in the natural world: branches, seeds, leaves, the arc of a season. Emotion that hasn't been cleaned up.

The figure has always been the hardest subject in visual art — everyone, child and expert alike, recognizes when something feels wrong. That unforgiving quality is precisely what draws me to it. It's where craft and mystery have to negotiate with each other. Where your deepest convictions get earned or exposed.

HOW I WORK

I work at intimate scale. I'm drawn to the bozzetto, the sketch model, the fragment — works that carry the heat of the artist's hand and thought at the same moment. I don't want work that announces itself. I want it to invite you in, to reward the person who slows down.

I think in series, not in isolated objects. A single figure can say something. But a group of figures organized around a theme — a philosophical question, a passage of human experience — can say something that no individual work could carry alone. That's where I want to work.

CURRENT WORK

Le Quattro Stagioni — The Four Seasons — is my first major solo exhibition, currently in development. Four allegorical figures: Primavera, Estate, Autunno, Inverno. The seasons of a year, and the seasons of a life.

Inverno, the final figure, is an elderly man, slightly hunched, bare branches surrounding him. In his hand, barely visible, a few seeds. The cycle will begin again. There will be another spring.

Surrounding the four principal figures will be a constellation of related work — portrait masks, busts, fragments, reliefs, drawings — inviting the viewer into the process of discovery as much as its conclusions.

“Faith is the ground beneath everything I make. It is the light I carry as I make my way to the water's edge.”