My creative journey began in May of 1957 – I was born the son of an evangelist (traveling preacher) in Manchester Connecticut. My family often traveled with my father and I soon got my first taste of the American countryside. By age eight we moved to Maine where the woods became my playground and I continued my fascination with nature. By age 15, we moved to Pennsylvania and I got my first real camera while attending high school. It was about that time I was introduced to interior design and the drapery business by three old Czechoslovakian Jews who had migrated to the Philadelphia area when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. At age sixteen I started my own interior design business while continuing to work with my mentors. After high school, I started going to Temple University for a few years but after a bout of Bell’s Palsy I left school and joined the Army to work in Intelligence. After Intelligence School, I served in Psychological Operations attached to the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After a couple of years I was able to get a transfer to Hawaii where I worked as part of a Current Intelligence Team in a Command Center for the Pacific Area of Command. During my time in the service I continued my formal education and continued to photograph landscapes and nature both in North Carolina and Hawaii.
After my time in the Army I decided to leave the University of Hawaii and go back to Temple University to study Architecture. The first year architecture program at Temple was one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. However, the program was coming under scrutiny of the Accreditation Board. I decided to move to the San Luis Obispo area to study architecture at Cal Poly. I was most influenced by architects from the Art Nouveau period like Antoni Gaudi, whose flowing forms were based on natural forms and by architects like Aldo Van Eyke who was foremost a protagonist of structuralism as it pertained to architecture. In general, structuralism is the theory that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. One of Aldo Van Eyck’s sayings was that “a leaf is a tree, and a tree is a leaf”.
While looking for design generating concepts, I quickly became interested in abstracting natural forms into structural principals. These principals manifested into projects like dwellings that scaled the way trees do, (using large exposed timbers to span large distances the ways a tree uses large branches to go long distances and twigs to go short lengths,) and laying out plans on dynamic grids instead of the static grids most current architectural projects are laid out on. I also did concept generated designs, like designing a wave vacation house, based on what it would be like to be immersed inside a wave, with the idea that being immersed inside a wave, would be like being baptized, or returning to the womb, in keeping with the idea that a vacation is a renewal experience.
I was also being influenced by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe and artists from the Regionalist period like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. What I enjoyed most were their interpretations of nature and natural form; not their interpretations of American people as in American Gothic. The Regionalist Period occurred in response to the depression era when so much was lost and artists were were connecting with what still moved them–much the way writers in the Modern period of literature were looking for an epiphany of enlightenment after WWI ended the Romantic Period.
While studying Architecture at Cal Poly I also continued taking classes in photography and started doing ceramics. I originally learned to throw pieces on the wheel and found it very cathartic to let go of all outside thoughts and influences and concentrate only on the mandala of the wheel. However, it was here that I first started curbing my tendencies toward perfectionism, towards a more pragmatic approach. While throwing a vase that became unbalanced and unsymmetrical, I began sculpting it into a form that was more in the nature of clay. Clay doesn’t naturally want to become perfectly ordered and shaped, It wants to be in a more natural form. Georgia O’Keeffe talked about the adobe house in which she lived in New Mexico. It was laid out on a Gothic foundation with golden mean dimension ratios of two to three – what designers of that era thought to be perfection. While the house was laid out on perfection, she thought the adobe mud became more “human” and less perfect as the walls moved upward.
While attending Cal Poly, I continued to work in the interior design business. After Cal Poly it was more lucrative than architecture and so I continued in interior design.
However, it was not as creatively exciting as architecture so when the construction slow down started around 2004 I started gravitating towards my love of photography and nature. I love interpreting the beauty of nature through the eye of the camera whether it be landscapes, wildlife, humans, or even human-made.
Join me on my continuing journey…