To capture beauty, you have to play in the mud.
I grew up next to the Warren Dunes on Lake Michigan, building sandcastles on the beach and shaping the mud that washed across the dirt roads after the rain. It’s essentially the same material I work in now. I didn’t know it at the time, but the hands were already learning.
My father was an inventor and photographer; my stepfather owned three motion-picture film labs; my mother served as a past president of the Chicago Models Association. Art reached me early — my father and I photographed the Surrealism and Impressionism wings of the Art Institute of Chicago in 3-D, and his stories about Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz bringing the new French movement to America have stayed with me ever since.
From Photography to Form
My path to sculpture ran through other lives first. I managed a motion-picture laboratory, owned a photographic studio, worked as a Hollywood talent manager and a marketing director. Each one taught me to see. But it wasn’t until I started using my hands that the vision truly cleared.
The turn was sudden. In 2001 I was marketing director at a Las Vegas limousine company when 9-11 brought the city to a standstill. I began sculpting full time — first casting performers from Cirque du Soleil’s “O,” then ballet dancers, showgirls, and a range of celebrities and actors. What began as functional art — lamps and tables — quickly became fine art: figurative work in glass, metal, ceramics, and mirror tile. The commissions came in, the galleries wanted the work, and I realized I needed to design my own equipment to produce it at scale.
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Where will life take you?
I have managed a motion picture laboratory and owned a photographic studio, I was a Hollywood talent manager, a marketing director… Uber driver and limo driver but all that was prelude … Osmosis helps but your eyes will deceive you… when you start using your hands your vision will clear. It was a profound awakening. Once you’ve learned to bend light — to watch coastal sunlight pass through kiln-formed glass — something changes for good.
My work is an ongoing conversation with those who came before, with beauty, with the human form. You never really know where life will take you
An Ocean of possibilities
In 2007 I set up a production studio on the beach in Rosarito, Mexico, near the old Titanic film set, I met Aldo Santini. It was not a quiet place to work — the Mexican drug war was just igniting, and there was gunfire most nights while I worked outdoors. I kept going. Over the years there I custom-designed and built the equipment that lets me reproduce life-sized figurative sculpture in glass, metal, and ceramics — with very few limits on what’s possible in the studio.
