The Arch has dominated my studio since 2019.  I used the height of my tallest son for the inner dimension. It began two years before COVID became the backdrop of my retirement. Working on it in isolation, I worried no one would ever see it. It was not portable.

The spring before the pandemic, I began something that was portable. The Cabinet of Curiosity is an introduction to my life as an awestruck practitioner of attempted magic. It is my homage to child-like wonder as a phenomenon.

My work consists of painting, sculpture and printmaking. I began in Brooklyn, NY, as a city kid in love with the museums. I went to MOMA instead of high school some days. Art became the central focus of my life as a teenager. Later, I supported myself and my family by teaching art. To me, Art is about human connection and what it means to be alive. The greatest gift is to be present at the flow of universal imagery.

The paintings and drawings I do are concerned with mining the universe of my subconscious thought through automatic drawing. My process is an uncontrolled fit, eyes closed, madly scribbling, which leads to more drawing, eyes open, in an attempt to order chaos in a presentable way. For the past 12 years, in more than 2200 gouache and watercolor images forming The Book of Umm, I have benefited from a daily morning meditative painting process. The new series of paintings known as “Terra Firma,” continues the automatic approach by investigating the dynamics of a square format. Human figures are presented in odd situations. The viewer is asked to interpret.

The sculpture presents a similar deployment of automatically derived imagery but in a three-dimensional architectural setting. The same drawing process is applied to specific sculptural elements that are then combined to make a section of a sculpture. Using a wide range of scale, from table-top to installations, I apply figurative elements in carved basswood reliefs to forms inspired by world architecture and religious culture such as the arch, the tower and the reliquary.

Printmaking is my origin story. I first fell in love with Expressionist woodcuts and the prints of Edward Munch as a high school student in NYC. When I discovered the work of Frans Masereel, it was his work that started me on a mission to develop a personal vision of the woodcut novel, hand-printing on a press, small editions of books of my own design.

The significant feature through all of this is the importance of Narrative in human connection. We tell each other stories all day long. May our narratives gain strength in the telling.