Thank you for visiting!


Over the years I’ve worked in a lot of different two and 3D media across a considerable range of techniques. Each new way of working represents a curiosity---an urge to explore physical materials and the expressive languages they might yield. I am an inveterate prober, and the stuff of the world around compels questions and investigation---with each transformation of media there’s the potential for new and compelling meaning---new significance. Whether teaching and working in printmaking, sculpture, painting, silver or ceramic, it's all about running studios and classrooms as collaborative spaces---laboratories fueled by questions, devoted to deep inquiry and the adventure of charting novel terrain.


Soon I will include photography, silver work, ceramics and sculpture as well as more info on shows, installations, collaborations, classes and workshops, past, present and future.


 


On Practice


For me practice isn’t defined as an art practice isolated to my studio but a life practice informed by the ways of knowing that art and aesthetic experience make possible. Art making is about much more than making things AND by working with the phenomenal stuff of the world I engage and commit. WITH this stuff, through its transformation I join. Join humanity, my animals, the wonder of plants and insects, know the wind and rain better, see light with nuance, smell with more awe, deliver back more accurately, feel what is needed, grok fragility and eternity in the fiber of things . . . trust a branch to hold my weight.


 


Practice is about making new knowledge, new meaning, new communion, new reverence, feeling gravity and pondering the consequences of my actions. Practice is investigation, experimentation, being a good watcher, a fearless mucker in search of the connective tissue among phenomena. I hope my making-practices as an artist make me a better teacher, a more careful gardener and tender of animals -- that my art practice makes me a better friend and member of a community. I’m pretty sure my art practice makes me a better thinker. That’s a lot to ask of art, but I can’t bear a world without art, and I am horrified by any suggestion that art abandon the world, retreat to the gated community of high culture and speak only to itself, self-referential and decadent. My existential condition insists that art make connections —be useful. I resist the possibility that I, as an artist, should spend my time, my life, doing less–-that I have fewer expectations for what I endeavor to do—care less. I have to believe and be unsatisfied, remain faithful to this promise. The holy grail and utterly unachievable, faith is a challenge, a quest, a profound desire. Making art teaches me that I never arrive but rest for a moment to consider what it is I have made real in order to step again into the question.