Biography
In 1973, when I was in my first year of high school, I enrolled in a class taught by the art teacher at the Urban School of San Francisco. The class was intended to teach us how to build stained glass windows but I quickly noticed that the teacher was actually a potter. I had been curious about clay and fire for a few years so I asked her to teach me to throw on a wheel once the required glass window had been completed. She agreed.
That started what has become a lifetime fascination with mud, fire, and glass and how my hands can utilize those components in endlessly amusing ways. During the next semester in the art center, I wore out my welcome because I simply used too much time and too many resources.
The next step was becoming the grunt apprentice to a formally trained production ceramicist in the Richmond District of San Francisco. I spent almost four years doing the tasks necessary to keep that studio functioning. In exchange for this I received studio time and constant instruction, mainly through observation and mimicry. Tom, the master, wasn't much of a conversationalist but he knew his art as though it were a part of his genetic structure. He had a tremendous influence on my technical knowledge and abilities including kiln building.
After graduating from high school and moving to Santa Cruz to attend U.C.S.C., I found myself in need of studio space. Once again, a production potter, making her living creating and selling ceramics, especially large stoneware sinks, hired me to do the grunt work in exchange for studio time and gallery space. Sylvia Clark was another rather non-verbal artist who clearly preferred her privacy, but I was able to watch and learn so I watched, and I learned.
When my college years ended and I started working in the corporate world, wearing a suit every day to afford to live in Marin County, I joined a couple of coop studios including Artfire which I founded with another artist in 2002.
Back then my life had two distinct identities. By day I was walking around an office in delicate clothing carrying an HP-12C and in the evenings and on weekends, the world of mud, fire and parenthood took over.
In 2023, after careful consideration, I left Artfire, bit the bullet and built out my studio space where I live, fulfilling a dream that had been lurking since the early 1980s. "Sparky", the kiln huffs and puffs, always reminding me that the heart of intrigue is often based on variables over which we have no control.