In the beginning, I didn’t realize I wanted to be an Artist. Well, not an artist that created physical sculpture anyway. My artistic journey started with performance in the theatre, light and set design and my greatest desire, directing. This led me to travel, attend school and to work across the pond in England. I experienced the architecture and amazing sculpture of Italy which, I realized years later, had a profound effect on me. Back home, being put into a working situation with stone sparked something – I could shape, mold and change hard materials with power tools, chisels or whatever I had. This was so creatively different for me that it took me over. I was working professionally in the theatre but found that I wasn’t doing what I had set out to do. Stone carving adopted my focus and I realized that it was a journey that could teach me things artistically that I never thought about before. From that time over 20 years, I have attempted to understand form as a feeling, much like a stage performance evokes a feeling. A form can be natural or sculpted or a combination of both. Form needs texture, line, and balance to create that “just right” emotion for the viewer and I very much enjoy executing these aspects in stone to find that emotion for myself. What I love most about physical art is that every individual has a different emotion about every piece of art. One piece can be hated by all but life-saving for one. Another can be hailed as brilliant by the masses but genuinely not understood by one. I take an individual stone, let it speak to me and try to evoke that emotion. I then add what I think would be the proper way to express that feeling that it gave me – sometimes the stone itself is more art than a human can achieve and sometimes the stone allows me to change it entirely, creating something that far exceeds the feeling that I originally had. Like the many layers of a theatre stage show, I add sound, light, surrounding detail and unseen infrastructure to make form a performance. I then present it to you to possibly spark a worthwhile feeling through simplicity or complexity. Telling a good story on stage is challenging. Telling a story through a stone is difficult at best. I simply have to do it, do it the best I can and hopefully, each piece will find the one or more people that it truly speaks to.
