Early Works

In 1970 I acquired my first camera and immediately became obsessed with the entire process and for the next six to seven years I was either out taking photos or in the darkroom to find what little bits of magic I might have captured. During this time I would draw these simple little flowers with a circle filled with many dots as the center of the image. Out of this center would come groupings of paired lines that would all ways cross each other at least once before terminating at a single point to represent the twisting petals of the flower.

I considered these little drawings simple doodling compared to the importance I felt for my photographic work, but I did get a profound pleasure in drawing the crossed lines of the petals. It was as if each line was imbued with the life force or the whole life time of an individual, crossing other peoples lives, influenced by changing situations, coming across a life only once, crisscrossing a life many times during your whole life and, as in the image of the flower, crossing and having contact with an incredibly small segment of the whole and finally ending up at just some little point in space. These crossing lines of the petals would become the spring board for much of my sculptural work to come and were the first manifestations of my feelings about change.

By the mid 70's, to say that I was in a crisis with my photograph work would be a bit exaggerated, but I was having some serious questions about what I was doing. If for some reason I did not have my camera with me I would see all these things that just had to be photographed and if I did have it with me I started to feel that I was missing out on some kind of social context of things. It's kind of hard to explain but you are in a photographic state of mind, thinking photographically all the time. There was something wrong there and it just didn't seem to be enough.

Then something happened on the way down the ramp of the Guggenheim Museum. Near the bottom of Frank Lloyd Wright's art stopping spiral is a squared room. Alone and centered in this room was Brancusi's seal with its face sliced off. To date, this encounter has remained one of the strangest and strongest. Within a second I knew what I would do. My ignorance was such at this time that I had his name floating in my brain but truthfully knew nothing about his work. Dian Arbus and Judy Dater were much more my inquires. I went to the museum book shop and found this little monograph of self portraits he had photographed in his studio in Paris. Man Ray taught him the basics of the photograph magic and the photos were rough and grainy and the text was in French but it all did not matter. The dichotomy of photo and sculpture had been seeded. In some strange way I became Brancusi and my focus shifted from photography over to this whole new world of sculpture.

Click the images to get an enlarged view.

Schizophrenic Whale Oak 90 x 50 x 25 cm 1978

Change Plaster 35 x 45 x 15 cm 1979