I have been a working artist for almost 60 years.
I generally work on one series at a time.
Some series take months and some take decades.
I moved from figurative to abstract art around 2000.
Essential Tremor has made freehand drawing and painting almost impossible.
I live and work in Red Wing MN,
I will make art as long as I am able.
Creative work has always been the foundation of my life. In college I had six years of extensive training in drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history, and graduated with a B.S. Degree in Design. My career in retail design was very fulfilling, working worldwide in architecture and design, and over all these years I have always painted and made sculptures. I have presented figurative and abstract work in varying venues including competitions and private galleries throughout my life.
In the late 1990’s, I developed an Essential Tremor (ET). ET is a genetically inherited progressive neurological disorder, causing considerable shaking, primarily in my hands. Even with medication, the tremor reduces my ability to use small motor skills, limiting my ability to draw freehand. Faced with ever declining control of line making skills, I chose to refocus my art away from figurative work, to primarily abstract painting and sculpture.
I have always been a very structured person; military school, pre-med, then architecture and design. I prefer compositions that are geometric, rectilinear, symmetrical and controlled. I work to minimize my compositions with forms that embrace regimentation while employing a wide variety of sculptural and paint materials, application techniques and finished surfaces.
My artwork has always been conceptual in nature. I have a clear concept in mind before I begin new work. I use scale drawings, models, repetitive dimensions and the positioning of forms before I begin. Nonetheless, I allow the painting part of my artwork to be process driven and evolve as the work progresses.
My current series of sculpture and painting is “Material Geometry”. This artwork focuses primarily on forms and materials, exploring the spacial relationship of shapes, sizes and the relative positions of forms. They are constructionist, reductive and generally minimal in nature. In this series I have concentrated more heavily on sculptural forms, experimental materials application techniques and finishes with the work becoming increasingly three dimensional.