FieryEarthArt
life
I was born in 1957 in Detroit, Michigan.
I grew up roaming the woods and stony beaches on the shore of an immense freshwater 'ocean', the great Lake Michigan.
My memories of the lakefront are still alive to me : steady breezes off the lake carrying the tang of dried-up fish and lakeweed, and the pungent scents of the softly decaying woods along the shore. Smelt fishing on chilly nights in spring, wandering among people with nets and lanterns along the iron breakwaters, bringing home little fishes in buckets. Fourth of July celebrations with pie-eating contests and foot races on the beach, and body surfing the huge waves of late August. The bleak icy greyness of winter, when the misty horizon was lost in the lapping between sky and shore.
We had fortunate days full of freedom and bike exploration, climbing towering oaks, imagining clouds on the hazy horizon as mountains. I spent much of my youth outdoors, and my love for the natural world ran deep.
Fast forward to a career working as a medical illustrator & photographer for major teaching hospitals in 1980's Chicago. In those labor intensive, pre-photoshop days, we drew everything by hand with rapidographs that constantly clogged, ordered type from typesetters, and shot with film cameras.
I attended the School of the Art Institute in my free time, and it was there I first learned the technical intricacies of bending hollow glass tubes into abstract shapes, and electrifying them into neon light...I was hooked.
At the same time, the digital age began in earnest, and a sea-change came over the world of hands-on illustration and design.
Swept aside in the coming wave of computer-aided design, I left my life in the industrial north behind, and found my way to the high desert mountains of northern New Mexico.
Pacific coast of Oregon, 1999
High country of northern New Mexico, 2000
In the beginning, I lived in a converted loft studio in one of the few semi-industrial neighborhoods in Santa Fe. I began assembling neon with natural objects found while hiking in the wilderness. Over time, countless artists brought their work to me to be lit with neon, and I taught the craft to a few intrepid individuals.
The years passed, the millenium turned, and I eventually closed my Lena Street neon studio. Homesteading and gardening in the wild nature of an overgrazed property close to national forest became everything.
Now, from our perch in a modern cabin on the edge of a rolling ponderosa oak forest, we overlook a little river valley, and a mountain ridgeline rising off in the distance, often cloaked in clouds.
The deep black starry cosmos reigns by night, and in summers of drought and wildfire, we wait and pray for the rains. In the crisp biting cold of dry mountain winters, we dream of snow.
Art and life interweave, and I find truth and meaning in the words of a Japanese proverb :
"Art is the tracks, not the animal."