"The Fountain of Mooth", bronze sculpture, 26"x55"

While my training was seated in abstract modernism, I never really connected to it. The required rhetoric that it took to justify the explanation of the abstract just did not make sense to me. I wanted to produce sculpture that the public could instantly relate to, with figures and imagery that they could recognize. It took me twenty years to put modernism behind me and embrace the naive realism that personifies my sculpture today.

My sculptures usually begin in clay. When I pick up a lump of clay and begin to shape it, it is as if I command it and it forms by itself. I love the feel of the clay, squeezing, paddling, scraping, coaxing it under my fingertips into the shapes that I hope to bring delight to the viewer. From clay to bronze, cast stone or fiberglass, it does not matter what the finished material is because the joy, the emotion, the strength is in the clay model.

Most of my bas relief sculptures tell a story, usually related to local Bay Area history. The sculptures at Hills Plaza in San Francisco tell the story of the founding of San Francisco and all the ethnic groups who came to the Bay Area. Fire station 24 in Montclair has bronze bas-relief panels that give the history of the Oakland Fire Department. My fourteen foot rendition of the Pardee Dam, source of water for the East Bay, appears above the entry of the East Bay Municipal Utilities District in Oakland. It's a sobering thought to know that these sculptures will still be gracing those building facades long after I have passed on, but I still hope that they bring a smile to those who see them.