About me
I’m New Mexican artist specializing in sculptures and fabrications. Raised in Santa Fe, educated at the University of New Mexico, burqueño for many, many years now – New Mexico is a place I love, and a place that’s greatly influenced my view of the world. What I make comes, at least in part, from my locale. My inspiration also comes from our world – the physical, emotional, political, esthetic realities of our times.
I’ve been around tools and tool-users most of my life; as a young person, I learned a lot about creativity by watching craftsmen and tinkerers invent solutions to problems. That’s a reasonable description of what making art means to me. For a good while I worked with wood, struggling to learn how to be a furniture-maker in that demanding medium. I got the idea, eventually, but I never fell in love.
Fortunately, I discovered the wondrous flexibility and adaptability of steel as a medium of artistic expression. Infinitely forgiving, steel lends itself to improvisation. I like that. My work is hard to characterize. I don’t like to make the same thing twice, but there are recognizable themes. I’ve created sculptural works for numerous municipal and university outdoor sculpture exhibitions, and I also make smaller pieces suitable for indoor exhibitions. My work is in private and municipal collections.
process
I work from a studio in Albuquerque, where I make small to medium-sized work, and in a larger shop in Santa Fe where I build bigger pieces. My work process begins, of course, with an idea. Sometimes the idea bursts on the scene unbidden, which is always an inexplicable and happy occasion. At other times, for inspiration I consult my photo journal, which contains images from various sources that have attracted my attention; the image might be from last week or fifteen years ago. Museums, art books, junkyards, magazines, travel – all can contribute to the impulse to make an object.
Once the idea takes shape, I make sketches. I’m a poor draftsman, so my sketches are, of necessity, basic. Crude, even. They do help me visualize the proposed work, and they’re useful in determining the object’s eventual dimensions and proportions. Sketches also help me begin to identify the likely technical difficulties or obstacles that will need to be addressed during construction.
Sometimes, depending on the simplicity of the project and my familiarity with the required techniques, I’ll go directly from sketches to fabrication. If the work is more complicated or unfamiliar, I’ll usually make a maquette, or model, to guide me. For a large piece, a maquette can be invaluable. I can work and rework a three to four-foot version of the final sculpture until I’m happy with its appearance, and then I can use the model as a fabrication guide to scale up the full-sized piece.
Almost every time I make something, as I proceed with fabrication, I’ll discover that this way would look a lot better than that way, which in the beginning I thought was a good idea. So I’ll improvise, and change the design idea, sometimes drastically, in the middle of the construction process. For this reason I rarely build pieces from formal plans or for firmly-defined customer expectations. I don’t much like to work that way, although it has happened.
Themes
The Portfolio