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As I continue seeing them, I’m drawn to the overlaps in art, design and architecture. They fuel how I proceed in my thinking, designing, and making. That said I clearly recognize and respect the inherent  differences between these areas, - fundamental and purposeful differences. My work then is often about balancing the similarities with the differences. I more than often blend aspects of one of these areas with another. A painting may intentionally express and be readily perceived to have an architectural character or scale. A work of architecture may possess some sculptural aspects. I do not however think of or create architecture as sculpture as others do.

 

The differences in the process of making reside only in the medium, palette, and the purpose of the resulting thing. The end products are of course understandably different from one another, - a painting from a building, a public landscape from a personal garden, the final thing or place  guided as much by a wide range of factors, i.e. variety of size and scale, purpose, non-purpose, etc. The recognized and respected similarities and overlaps weigh heavily in my creative process.

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I began painting with evidence of intention and sincerity when I was 11 yrs. I was self-motivated and self- taught, traveling within my own small world of doing “realistic” representations that inspired me, mostly of single trees and then onto landscapes. I was also endlessly out in the landscape, making shelters by digging in the earth, on the surface of the land, and in the trees, - two and three level treehouses. I became one with the soil and trees. While higher in the branches above  the treehouses, just perched within them, it was deep absorption by seeing, feeling, hearing, - the psithurism at those heights took on new meaning! A visceral world indeed.

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I made an abundance of other things in my youth with my hands in a variety of materials, - furniture, bowls, you name it. My father was a cabinet maker and he had tools in my hands by the time I was 5. When I was a teenager he recognized my eye for color, and with his eyes being not so strong in that world, he soon had me mixing his stain colors for new and repaired furniture he always had under way.

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I was around 14 years when I decided that I also wanted to be an architect.

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I also played the piano, classical music, studying with teachers from age 7-17. After that I began to stumble through my own improvisations, borrowing from jazz, blues and rock modalities. The point is that I played an instrument, and it compounded into my being a doer by hand work. Music provides depthless inspiration to me. I paint what I hear and feel.

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In high school years I was devoted to painting like Andrew Wyeth.  A deep reverence for this artist was shared by all in my family. By the time I landed in my second year of architectural school where I was fortunate to probably do more art than architecture, in working through drawing, painting and various printing methods, I was slowly moving from away all aspects of making figural, representational, realistic, call it what you will art, whereby any one of myriad methods, one is rendering something chosen and preconceived, - rendering a ‘picture’ of a tree, still life, person, landscape, or what-have you. The seeding and nurturing provided in those early college years formed a profound transformation in my work, that continue to shape my art to this day. I will say however that I remain in love with the work of the man I discovered for myself as a teenager. Andrew Wyeth’s work, his intimate watercolors, especially the studies, are always pulling at me.

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I was incredibly fortunate to be in Washington University’s School Architecture at a time when one might say the school was defined more by a faculty of strong, gifted and devoted personalities, than by an over bearing, highly structured curriculum. Adding rich ingredients to my educational stew throughout my years there, I took full advantage of creating a considerable amount of independent study for myself. From within the collection of talented faculty, I was especially blessed to work with Leslie Laskey, Sheldon Helfman and a certain very special teaching assistant of Laskey’s at the time, Michael Swisher, who remains a dear friend and compatriot in navigating the visual world, if not many of the other worlds we live in.  They not only allowed, but encouraged, perhaps demanded, that I juggle and mix together the myriad things presented by art, architecture and design. 

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I had a deep long-lasting relationship with Leslie Laskey, starting as a student in his 2nd year design studio, then moving on to many 6 week long summer art studios with him in Michigan (mind you, for no university credit), becoming and remaining his teaching assistant for 6 years, and our being dear friends across 50 years of his nearly 100. 

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As I have moved along in life and professions, if I had one word to describe myself, it would be traveler. Traveling through ideas, the visual world, the worlds perceived and felt though the 5 senses, most deeply the visual world. Clearly, I’m more visceral than cerebral. I make things and through the process I revere what evolves through discovery, improvisation, sweat, pain at times, seeing no difference in working with paint on canvas, moving and re-shaping soil, mixing and forming wet concrete, working with wood in all manner and scale, drawing in multiple ways within the architectural design process. It’s all the same. My own house and landscape, inseparable from one another, are an ongoing project - a lifestyle really. Making.

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My art is inspired by landscape, music, poetics found anywhere. 

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My architecture is about creating meaningful places, not just spaces, and clearly not sculptures, but stages where upon and within, people can bring themselves, - not objects that impose themselves on people.