As far back as I can remember, I thought of myself as an artist. I remember being a small child being encouraged by my mother. She sat with my brothers and me and had us draw circles over and over, or playing with clay, or making up stories just to pass time.

My teenage years were filled with much of the emotional turmoil that is typical of that stage of life. The instruments I used to vent my feelings were artistic in nature. I wrote a great deal of poetry and formed figures with plasticine. At that time, I had no

My early career began with film and photography. My formal education in these disciplines came from Wright State University in Dayton, OH. The education I received was excellent, but the school was too conservative for my political bent. I found a great deal of frustration dealing with administrators that could not "appreciate" my work. What I thought was "honest" or "profound" was, to them (and in fact), crude and undisciplined. Even as I honed my craft, I still experienced frustration when I discovered that in a commercial society, documentaries and deeply symbolic political commentaries had little salability. My frustrations were taken out on unsuspecting pieces of newsprint and pencils, and on fragments of exotic hardwoods - laminated together, cut, and then therapeutically shaped into beautiful pieces of jewelry that were more marketable and much more satisfying.

My life took an interesting turn, as lives do, shortly after that and I became a father. I decided that I would need a more regular income in this role of responsibility, so I put away my art and went to work. For several years I dreamed of returning to my art, but never quite found the time. In the late 90's, I found myself working a job on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. With little else to do during my off hours, I decided to take advantage of the creative art center that the army made available to the residents. I soon found my two true loves in art - glass and clay.

Who would have thought, growing up two miles from the oldest art glass factory in the United States, that someday it would be my primary medium? My first pieces were flat glass panels, but I was soon adding dimension to them with beads and stones. I also started bringing pieces out of the glass and layering them to add depth and dimension, to take the glass further - to push its apparent limit.

At the same time, I was beginning to throw small pots. The feeling of creating small objects versus larger ones still has the same appeal as it did then… it has a sensual feeling in my hands. I feel as though I am only a vehicle for producing these manifestations of my soul. Each one is as unique as the moment they are created in each with its own heart and story. I then marry these pots with lids that I create of glass.

One of the things that I love most about life and art is the sense of adventure that comes from the unknown. To just let the moment flow from one point to its logical conclusion and then to admire or wonder at the place it ends up. This is the best way to describe my lids. While some pots cry out for the more obvious (as in my roses) others seem to beg for the starkness of geometrics, while yet others are so fluid in their feel that their lids result in more free-form pieces.

My larger flat work panels (and I use that term advisedly) come from another place inside me entirely. Being more complex by their very nature, they are the product of introspection and observation. I enjoy utilizing symbolism and icons from the spiritual and metaphysical realms. With each composition, I start with a basic concept and then make it deeply personal with the choice of color, shape, placement and technique that I use. I frequently incorporate fusing techniques into my panels to add a dimensionality that I could not do in any other way. I feel that this allows the piece more freedom to speak to the viewer, to convey its own individuality, and to stand on its own apart from the more obvious symbolism that it may convey.

In 1999 I created a vehicle to share my art with the world and (hopefully) change my career path from Industrial Inspection to something that better fit with my values and the way I wanted to live my life. That vehicle was Pisces Moon Studios. I held my first show prior to Christmas that year in Denver, Colorado. It met with much success which gave me the confidence to follow this path further. Six months later my wife and I found ourselves in Santa Fe, NM - a move that we had been trying to make for three

(or more) years. Soon after getting settled in to our new home, we found a wonderful studio space on Baca Street. Here I finally had the space to produce more of my art and to experiment with different ideas that had been rolling around in my imagination. This was the true birthplace of my nude glass sculptures, the (current) culmination of my artistic expression, technical know-how, and imaginative thinking.