Biography


Sundance, a small community in Northeast Wyoming, is where my journey begins. After completing high school, I received my B.A. degree from Black Hills State in Spearfish, South Dakota. Graduation from college was a turning point providing me an opportunity to wander, see new places, and meet new people. My early travels took me to teaching positions in Wisconsin and Arizona, where I also earned my M.A. degree at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. In Arizona I found the love of my life and inspirational soul mate. After moving to the Northwest, our family built a home in Oregon where the scenic McKenzie River meets the mighty Willamette at the south end of the Willamette Valley.

My teaching career spanned more than 30 years of working with young people, designing and building furniture and cabinets. As a teacher and artisan, one of my foremost goals was to help my students understand how functionality, good design and individuality can co-exist.

The artist in me can be traced to earliest childhood memories. Scratching designs on the face of sandstone cliffs and creating artwork with the colorful, granulated sandstone fascinated me. The one-room country school, taught by my mother, was the perfect environment for a young mind to grow and become aware of the surrounding beauty. We would go on walking field trips, seeing all manner of amazing things hidden in the sage brush and cactus. Petroglyphs drawn on nearby rock outcroppings by some long ago artists were but one lesson in experienceing and interpreting the natural world.

My love of art continued to evolve during my high school years, eventually leading me to a minor and major in the Arts in college. My formal education has been punctuated by ranch work from the time I could lift a bale of hay or ride a horse, a year of logging in Oregon and 13 seasons of commercial fishing near Kodiak Island, Alaska. Much of who I am and the art I create are gounded in a strong appreciation for the rugged individual, frontier lifestyle.

With a background so rooted in the primitive, natural world, alabaster is the perfect medium for expressing nature's beauty. Alabaster is an amazing material known throughout the centuries for its workability and beauty. The extensive variety of colors and patterns afford the collector endless choices. The classic vessel shapes that I create from a single block of alabaster, worked very thin, are literally prehistoric landscapes in the round which give a glimpse into a time we seldom experience.

My life now is much removed from the toil of the hay fields, and the pitching deck of an Alaskan seiner. Living on a small farm in the McKenzie River Valley, with my studio at my backdoor, has provided time to reflect on a life filled with adventure. My sculpture sifts through this history expressing itself in classic shapes that tell a story. Pick up a vessel, hold it up to the light and for a momemt see with my eyes and feel with my hands the soul of the stone and see the secrets it reveals.