I believe my want to create started in the formative years of my childhood. I grew up on a farm in rural Missouri, youngest of five children. Playful torment by my brothers and pop culture influenced my young ideologies. All three original Star Wars movies surrounded my adolescent years, first at 7 then later at 10 and 13. To hide from my brothers I would find a quite bathroom or closet and read comic books. I dreamed of the fantasy worlds I read about and watched on the big screen. These fantasy worlds were full of strange creatures and strange gadgets that mesmerized my young mind.
These strange worlds always came with a safe plotline that involved a villain terrorizing others with fantastic toys and finally getting caught by the good guys. I look back now and see that I was symbolically replacing my brothers with the ‘villains’ and the ‘other’ as me. I drew these magical worlds and built pieces of them with my Lego sets. My father, a supermarket manager, told me in high school to use my talents to become an engineer or architect and make lots of money. “Don’t be an artist, they don’t make any money until their dead and gone.”
I took his advice and joined the military to learn civil drafting and get the G.I. bill. I found that the military was too confining and after my first few college engineering classes I discovered that to was too creatively repressive.  After six years I went back to school in Arizona to learn art. I took classes from a great professor named Dick Markenson that introduced me to artwork by Henry Moore, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti. The abstracted forms intrigued me and I think they reminded me of the fantastical figures from my childhood. I first chose to carve wood then moved to metal and finally learned blacksmithing.
At Knox I have continued working with metal but with Mark Holmes and Tony Gant’s guidance I started working less with just physical positive forms and more with what Mark would call the Meta-object. This meta-object is not merely the positive space made by the material object but also the negative space the object activates. In a sense the space around the object is as important as the object itself. Thus the Meta-object becomes all positive space. I began making wire frame artworks that encompass large amounts of negative space and in doing so activate it into becoming positive space.
During open studio Tony suggested I use found or junk metals that already had a personality of their own; working with them rather than manipulating new metals and forcing a personality into them. I also started looking at work from artists such as Anthony Caro and Richard Serra. I found that by blending new and found metals in one artwork a greater complexity emerged. My later artworks developed from creating objects that could live within a fantasy world to creating objects comprised of fantasy environments. The individual pieces that make up an artwork talk to one another and sometimes even chase each other around the larger piece.
I also try to invoke an emotion through experiencing my art. Feelings that range from humor at looking at a whimsical creature dragging its body into a walking position to one of cool despair caused by a carcass of a ship. I ask that when you look at my artwork you slow down and experience how individual pieces talk and work with each other and with you.