I have read how artists start their journey as toddlers, learning to play the violin or paint at 2 or 3 years old … the truth is that I was fortunate to grow up next to the Warren Dunes on Lake Michigan. I spent a lot of time on the beach building sandcastles or playing in the dirt roads where there was plenty of mud after it rained. Basically the same material I use now. Was it the beginning of an art career?
My father was an inventor & a photographer. He took the 1st photo published in 1937 for Popular Photography with a camera he built! My Step Father Paul Ireland owned Lakeside Laboratory motion picture film labs and manufactured film processing equipment. I ran the business. My mother was president of the Chicago Models Association. My grandfather, C O Young was a heart surgeon, published author & owned Surgeon’s General Hospital in Chicago. Clarence Platt my maternal grandfather was a missionary to the Navajo’s and was the community pastor in Harbert Michigan where he helped raise this crazy artist who just wanted to do his own thing. on the beach!
God knows I had a lot to live up to, LOL
To capture beauty, you need to play in the mud.
Art crept into my soul while my father and I photographed the Chicago Art Institute’s Surrealism and Impressionism wings in 3-D. Flashbacks of his lectures on how his fellow photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz brought this new French art movement to the US and how important it would become to the world in my lifetime still haunt me!
Now, I share an eternal connection with those who have lived before – to beauty, to aesthetics and to the human form in sculpture. Now, It is my passion to bring today’s art world into that eternal nexus.. to see that ART is really an all encompassing sensory experience that God gave us to behold. ART is that unexplained ability we sometimes see in clairvoyants, mystics or psychics who are in touch with the eternal. I spend weeks, sometimes months developing, finishing, molding, pouring sculpture creations. Often it’s multi tasking with various procedures, molds have to dry for weeks and specialty chemicals can only be applied in the right conditions.
Where will life take you? I have managed a motion picture laboratory and owned a photographic studio, I was a Hollywood talent manager, (Donna D‘Errico on the right) a marketing director… an Uber driver and limo driver but all that was a prelude … Osmosis helps but your eyes will deceive you… when you start using your hands your vision will clear. It was a profound awakening. In 2001 I was the marketing director at a Las Vegas limousine company when the 9-11 event happened. Vegas came to a standstill. I began creating sculptures full time. I started casting performers from “O”. I moved on to ballet dancers, a lot of showgirls & strippers, celebrities and actors. At first it was to make functional art, (lamps & tables) then quickly I started doing “fine art”, metal sculptures, some painted & collaborative work… I started designing and building and testing my own equipment to do glass, ceramics, metal and mirror tile. Commissions came in and galleries wanted my sculptures but making them took a huge amount of space and time. I needed to ramp up production.
The Beach & an Ocean of possibilities
Being able to hear or see or touch or taste art means shifting the way you process your senses. I set up a production studio by the beach in Rosarito Mexico next to the Titanic set. (studio in this photo) There was gunfire every night as I worked outdoors in the studio and the drug wars got started. I literally dodged bullets but kept working… I was exhilarating! Now, I have the equipment to be able to reproduce figurative sculptures in glass, metal and in ceramics. Literally and figuratively – there are few limits or boundaries involved with what I can do.
I have recently returned to Vegas.. Once you bend light and glimpse the possibilities… my life changed. Mexico did some of that and that sunlight by the ocean passing through the kiln glass. There just are no words.. but I think I am just getting started!