Artist Statement

“Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

When I was 3 years old my father made me a set of “building blocks” out of pinewood. I spent many hours creating and building things with those blocks. Cars, houses, castles, bridges and anything else my little imagination could dream up.

When I was about 12 years old I built a “fort” out of scrap wood. I would routinely collect pieces of wood from the scrap bin at the local lumberyard. Over the course of a year I built a three-room fort on the ground under two large pine trees in our backyard. I loved it – it was my place, I designed, I built it and I could spend hours in it dreaming big dreams for my life.

As I sat down to write this statement it suddenly occurred to me that I have been doing the same thing once again. Only this was now the adult phase of my fascination with collecting wood. I was not conscious at all that I was repeating a cycle that started when I was a child – I was just doing what I do – I make things out of wood.

And so five years ago, I began collecting wood from all parts of the city of Los Angeles. There is wood, literally, almost everywhere I look – a wood scavenger’s utopia. There is so much wood, in fact, that, when I come across pieces of it now, I have to decide if I have room for it in my workshop or not.

Wood is a primitive material. And, it is an indispensable material involved in so many aspects of our daily lives. We owe our continued existence on this planet to trees. Without them we would not have oxygen to breathe. Trees have been around for more than 370 million years. And I believe they will be here long after we humans are gone. They are the Earth’s oldest and largest living things. And I stand before them in complete awe. The simple task of lightly sanding the bark off a delicate tree root can put me in touch with the infinite and place a contented smile on my face that will last the whole day.

When you work with wood long enough you begin to understand that it is alive. And it breathes. And it moves. It moves like a 400-year-old Zen master of the planet. As I sand (or polish) a piece of wood, it feels to me like I am slowly excavating its very soul - exposing all of the tree’s wisdom and inner beauty.

As I explore the beauty of wood grain and combine it with the deep expressions of paint I am often reminded of my own place in this world. I am but a tiny piece of a massive jigsaw puzzle put together a long time ago without my knowledge or consent. The Earth is not my foe. I need not conquer it. I need only to co-exist with it and it will inspire me to do great things.

The images and sculptures that I create with wood and paint are grounded here in the natural world but are also infused with my own sense of other-worldliness. These paintings symbolize for me that human survival is ultimately based on our positive or negative relationship with our Mother Earth. I offer these humble artworks as a small token of my appreciation to the greatest natural resource that we humans cannot live without.