Follow your dream

The Artist’s Tale

I think artists are born, not made. As a child, I was always making things—taking stuff apart, rebuilding it, and turning the bits into something else. As a teenager, while my friends had Saturday jobs, I was decorating houses, hanging wallpaper, and rag-rolling walls. But we all grow up, and I became a surveyor. For a time, I made buildings instead of art.

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Every chance I got, I escaped and traveled. I love the sunshine, I like creating almost anything, and I have always been obsessed with metal.

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For years, metal was my primary language. Creativity was defined by resistance: the fight against the material, the heat of the process, and the violence of the hammer. It was art built on the belief that if you can visualize it, you can make anything. The inevitable injury was part of the process—a bit of the magic.

Recently, that urge to build and develop has spilled over the edges of the anvil. This transition is not a softening; it is a translation of force. It is about allowing yourself to visit that bucket list and finally get it done.

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Ceramics, something I hadn’t touched for years, offer new possibilities. No hammers, welders, or gloves. I hate gloves, masks, and respirators. It is a calmer, more intimate struggle with form, but one that ultimately seeks the same visceral truth found in my metal sculpture. The work in clay is born of necessity; I have a colossal project in mind that has lived with me for a while, and this must be the medium. I am also a bread maker. Paradoxically, it's the same mindset as sculpture—I have it in mind to sculpt in food.

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Painting is approached with that same physicality. 

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The Chaos series is exactly that—the painting of anger, a raw and unpolished release of energy that echoes the aggressive atmosphere of the frenetic, maddening world around us. Where the sculptures capture the body in stasis, the paintings capture the turbulence of the mind. We all take photos, but when I paint someone, I want to paint the person. I am not looking for a physical likeness as much as the character. The trouble is, how do you capture that exactly? It remains frustratingly elusive.

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And then, there is the water. The sea has often been the resting place for my sculptures, but where they are metal, this is paint. It needs to be captured in its living state. The sea is a violent, churning, out-of-control, and staggeringly beautiful world. I am a swimmer; I swim in the sea most days. The shocking awesomeness, reborn every morning.

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Whether wielding a hammer, teasing a brush, or shaping clay, the intent remains the same: to give flesh to the images infesting my dreams and swirling in my head.