I was born in Frankfurt Germany and raised outside of Washington D.C. I went to college in Texas tostudy computer science. In my late twenties I moved to San Francisco. I’ve been living in the hills of San Francisco for 20 years now. I spend as much time as I can in my art studio when I’m not at my full-time job being a geek writing software code.
As a child my father used my room as his art studio. It was his way of bonding with me when he wasn’t at his fulltime job being a soldier in the U.S. Army. He took me to the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. every weekend when he had a chance. All this was fun and great at an early age, but I really didn’t revisit my artistic side until I turned 40. I studied at the Academy of Art in San Francisco for a couple of summers then struck out on my own to find my message and medium. A couple of art receptions in New York City several years ago accelerated my creative drive to pursue mixing glass with bronze.
I would describe my aesthetic as smooth and raw surfaces, colorful, liquid and melting. I draw inspiration from the visible and non-visible spectrum of light in the world, the fires that forge and melt away our life for all the good and bad, and the angels we look to find but never discover how close and present they are already in our life.
For my glass work, I start with very basic shapes and build up to create my puddles of melt most common in my current work. For my cast figurative glass work, I’ll create several positive and negative molds to ultimately fuse glass into. For my bronze work, I like to construct skeletal frames and slowly lay the muscle tissue down from the bone to the surface of skin or wing. My process moves from the inside out to the physical world.
Dale Chihuly’s versatility and Marvin Lipofsky’s psychedelic shapes inspire me from a glass artwork perspective. As for my bronze work, I draw inspiration from the aesthetic and expressive style of Stephen De Staebler.
In the future, I’d like to see my melting dichoric glass artwork hanging in the Los Angeles Getty and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Washington D.C. I’d also like to do the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Chicago. I’ll look to create bronze sculptures with colorful brawny dichoric glass elements when the time is right. The expressive and broken abstracted winged figures of Stephan De Staebler will be my inspiration.
