A Little Background.....

I’ve been a carpenter, remodeler and wood worker since high school, so I’ve been making things for 40+ years.  I made a few art pieces in the early 1970s (including some crude mobiles!) when I shared an apartment building with (and was inspired by) a couple of friends who have been full-time artists ever since. 

In 2005 I finally had the time, money and available work space to get back into making standalone art pieces. I took a welding class and started making mobiles a la Alexander Calder, (that's him holding the mobile parts) which I did for the first five years. Then I worked in other mediums: lost wax casting, crop circle reproductions, yard art, mechanical gizmos, and some feeble attempts at Chuck Close portrait painting.  

In late 2014 I turned to wood laminate art. It’s a culmination of all the work I’ve done so far, because it requires bending and welding steel to make the forms, as well as various wood working skills and tools to cut, bend, glue and sand the wood. Lots of sanding! 

I put a lot of time into these, creating over 20 objects over five years, until I downsized my life in 2019 and moved to a place where I can’t make them anymore.  A lot of that work is immortalized in a series of videos on my YouTube channel called "The Garage Artist."  I did some narrated step-by-step videos explaining how to make wood art. 

When that phase was done, I went back to painting, which I’ve been doing since early 2020. Not sure where this medium is going, but it’s definitely going slow!  I've chosen to do intricate geometric themes that take a long time, using lots of blue tape to render clean, straight lines.  You can see them on the Painting page.  

Every once in a while I get inspired to do a new mobile or two, plus you can see the wire sculpture on the Metal Art page (homage to Picasso) that I completed in late 2021.  I am now living in France, doing the best I can as time and inspiration allow. In fact, from 2022-2024 I was 95% committed to creating a piece of installation art called "a house," meaning I went back to being a remodeler and basically touched every floor, wall and ceiling as we completely renovated a 20-year-old house in our small town.

Like most artists, I get ideas from everywhere: nature, common objects, and of course, other artists in galleries and museums. Many times I’ve seen something in a gallery and said to myself, “I can make that.” Then I spent whatever time and money it took to produce something new.

Calder made 3,300 art pieces in his life, and most of his big monumental stuff came when he was in his 60s and 70s. There’s still hope!