I subscribe to Jasper John’s notebook statement, “ Take an object. Do something to it. Do Something else to it. Do something else to it.”

I am now creating small figurative objects in clay, working by hand in the medium’s traditional manner, while stretching its identity as a contemporary three-dimensional material. I call them “effigies“, an academic colleague describes them as, “anthropomorphic figurines”, and my granddaughter, says they are simply, “Poppa’s dumb dolls.”

I do not consider myself a “ceramist”. For me, clay is direct, tactile, plastic, forgiving- and of course- and relatively cheap- if you have the energy to go dig for it. I routinely make a number of successive new forms to ponder and mentally digest, allowing each figure to suggest and direct the next. One thing will lead to another and then to another. Depending upon how the piece speaks to me, I will sometimes paint the figure, attach something, paste a collage, or physically mount the object into other context, or just leave it alone. Or.... dump it in the slop bucket and start all over again.

The direction of my work is self-referential and reflects many varied life, work, travel, and visual experiences, mostly good, a few bad. Most of my objects have a story to tell and usually have a figurative reference, melding the past (sometimes the primordial or archaic) with current conditions, references, and connections.
Kirk Robertson, wrote, upon the occasion of my exhibition at the Oat Park Art Center, “The works are melange of cross cultural references. Metaphorical allusion to Japanese tomb sculpture, the Egyptian Sphinx, ancient Olmec heads, Guatemalan textiles, and European cairn sculptures figure prominently, as do the lives and martyrdom of selected dead saints, virgin martyrs and holy hermits. Collectively, they are insightful, decidedly humorous, slightly irreverent conflations of, and commentary on, the uses of iconography in art.”