My interest in the natural world of the plant kingdom has been a lifelong fascination. I can remember sitting in my grandparents' garden in Chicago as a young child sketching the many types of flowers, vegetables and wild strawberry plants that grew there and from that point have never tired of recapturing the same child-like wonder in creating my works of art. My love of nature deepened in the woods of Wisconsin where each Summer, with my family, we camped upon forty acres of forested land.
Straight out of high school I boarded a train for the backwoods country of West Virginia where I lived on the 'Knob', a small enclave of writers and artists. There I busied myself writing articles, growing vegetables and making illustrations for the 'Mountain Call, a publication that celebrated Appalachian culture and which also ran articles educating the local residents about the many issues and problems associated with strip mining and land rights issues. During my time spent there I traveled extensively throughout the state exploring beautiful and remote mountainous areas recording my many impressions with pen, paper and watercolor.
Several years later my continuing interest in different cultures with their natural settings led me to travel to Mexico and Central America where I would spent several months out of each Winter wandering the rainforests filling volumes of my sketch books with all types of plant forms. These sketches would become the nucleus for an internal record of the many varied elements of plant anatomy leaf, stem, seed, stamen, blossom, thorn that would form a lexicon of symbolic natural elements that would infuse much of my later work.
At this same time, when back in Chicago I was busy studying the figure through extensive cycles of drawings and prints taken from life that honed my ability to express the many qualities of human nature. The close observation from life metamorphosized into my own vision of the human form much in the same way that my previous interest in plant shapes had also progressed.
I became intensively focused on the understated little appreciated relationship of humanity with the plant kingdom, which despite our efforts to destroy it sustains our existence upon this planet. Two emergent themes of my visual universe came forth in the consistent portrayal of the human form and the dynamics of organic plant forms as sharing a common morphology. The shapes natural to the plant world appearing to have many human characteristics and in turn the parts of the human body mirroring many plant like aspects.
This correlation led to an almost unconscious intermingling of both kinds of shapes in the resultant final image or object where the somatic knowledge of each resonates within the other in the manifestation of hybrid forms.
My current work represents a subtle shift from the primarily human to the predominantly plant. Even the materials that I have chosen to use reflect an evolution from pigment to glass to bronze to clay and around again, creating a continuous cycle in sympathy with the cycles of the natural realm. This work seems to come of a compulsion to 're-bioengineer' the concept of the human species, co-mingling the structural elements of both but stressing plant-like sensibilities.
< > < > < > < > < > < > < > < > < >
< > < > < > < > < > < >
- return to top - or go back to the main homepage