About

The surest task of an artist is the making of a self that has the capacity to create, and directing this creative capacity toward a significant direction. This task must be approached with great patience and commitment, understanding that self-as-artist is an every day & lifelong pursuit.

This making of self has meant finding what leads me, and pursuing the thread of that lead. Immersion in and appreciation of Nature has been a constant pursuit, twin to my pursuit of the arts, assuring that art and life retain the living quality of intuitive response.

Immersion in nature was, for a time, of a magnitude of order beyond what is normally possible. Through my late teens and all through my 20's my summers were on the Continental Divide above Boudler, Colorado at the Boulder Watershed. Most of those 12 summers were spent as Patrol/Caretaker, hiking the 8,000 acre property and keeping it free of all human trespassers. Two glacial valleys, 14 lakes, 5 thirteen thousand foot peaks, a herd of 70 elk, moose, bear, mountain lions, golden eagles, pica, pine martens, and cutthroat trout- I was the land's protector hiking 10 to 20 miles per day, with elevation gains and losses of more than 10,000 feet, mostly in the back country with no trails. This experience allowed a creative wayfinding that has allowed me to navigate the arts in a manner that listens with an intuition for intuition. In the way of constant walking- through forests, fording rivers, over mountains, the practice of immersive movement acts as a vehicle for artistic exploration, rather than an end in itself.

What is one to do with an artistic muse that asks things of you that are the only sense of a path in a pathless world? One might try to follow an illusory path of academia; it is a way to begin, or it was possible at one time, I'm not sure if it was even in my long ago time, or if there ever can be an academic path to Fine Arts. Industrial Arts (graphic design, architecture, etc), surely, but Fine Arts...well, Art did experience a cultural death spiral in the post-modern era, where corporate markets are the prime determinate of value. Far from the arts commodities world, is the working class public school student with natural ability/inclination/motivation; this is a low oxygen atmosphere for Fine Arts to find root, and if pursued in a manner that does not eat its own tail in finding a working-class profit through applied talent, will almost certainly die in a vacuum. 

My high school art instructor spent most of his time in his office, hungover or stoned, and had me run the student art store and help anyone out with any questions. He was fired at the end of my Junior year, and for my Senior year I had the luck of a solid art teacher. She selected me as a finalist for the annual art scholarship for seniors. She argued for me to the committee, but they didn't accept her reasoning, and instead chose someone who wasn't going on in the arts, needed no financial help, but whom the school thought would benefit the program the most. She explained how it had played out, but hoped that I would continue on in the arts.  I was accepted into a state college just after turning 18, then headed up to the continental divide for my first summer working at the Boulder Watershed. After moving myself into the dorms at summer's end my mother informed me that I was legally an adult so she was renting out my room, and that I was to pay for college myself. Prior to this she had insisted that I go into psychology, and I had resignedly signed up for coursework in that direction; I dumped those courses and changed over to an art major. In the first semester of my Freshman year, the university held up my college loan and told me I had to forfeit it to the school. After months of going rounds with them, just prior to Thanksgiving break, I was sat down by the financial manager and told that "maybe college wasn't for me" and that I should just leave as the loan couldn't be recovered from their system, but that I was still liable for the full amount to the federal government. My favorite adjunct art instructor noticed I was clearing out my locker and asked what was up. He told me to give him a day to fix it. I got a call to come back into the student loan office, where I was swept into the manager's office and told that a simple clerical error of a letter O being in the place of a zero was the entire issue and that it was solved and I could remain at University. I'm 100% certain this scam is never attempted on students with stable families. In my second semester all of my classes were now with tenured professors, and my drawing professor (who humble-bragged of his limp landscape work that adorned the suites of a local motel chain) told me I was "cheating somehow". He set up a system to catch me out in my method, enlisting another sneering professor to call me out of class into back rooms for off-the-cuff "art testing", leading to a conclusion that I was just a simpleton with an unlucky bit of talent. In my senior year this accomplice professor, who would be "let go" the following year for ongoing student complaints, dropped my academic standing from Suma Cum Laude to Cum Laude- all that he could manage without being caught out. They were both of a mindset that talent didn't exist, and that everything an artist needed to know could only be gained through submission to their specific ideation of the arts. My Sophomore 3-D studio professor not only told me that I was cheating, but held up my work for the entire class as an example of someone who had gone to the library, appropriated a design from another culture, and tried to pass it off as original work. After class I told him that this wasn't the case, and he offered I should then be able to create just as mature of a form with an entirely different focus, and gave me two days to come up with it. So I did. Upon seeing it he asked me to step into the hall, he apologized and told me I was an anomaly, something he had never encountered in his career of arts teaching; an artist. He asked that I stick with the second design so he could save face, even though he admitted the first was better and obviously where my interest was (I created it in alabaster years later, see Ouroboros' page). Universities in Colorado and Wyoming held a bi-annual interscholastic blind juried exhibition. I applied and was called in after the jury selection. My work had won the categories of sculpture, ceramics, metal smithing, and drawing. They felt it was unfair to other students that I had done so well, and were pulling my work outside of my major field from the show, allowing me an honorable mention in my field of sculpture if I agreed to pull my other works from consideration. 

Upon completing my undergraduate degree in sculpture at Colorado State University (graduating with Cum Laude honors and on the Dean's List and a member of the Gold Key National Honor's Society) my professors had encouraged me to apply out for MFA programs. 

My undergrad professor in Ceramics happened to be an internationally famous artist, considered by some to be the most important ceramicist of his era. He liked my work, and kept an entire series of my ceramic work to teach from. He sat me down one day when I was about to graduate and told me how the art world breaks down for a high-achieving Normal: 

The elementary teacher I had done my student teaching with was an exceptional educator, traveling nationally to lecture on arts education and also having served as the district's arts specialist. He encouraged me to consider teaching elementary, and was concerned that my ideals for art would be at loggerheads with high schools and I would burn out. He saw that I had wanted to teach at University, and advised that high school is not an equivalent in any way- and that the experience I had as a student teacher in the local high school would not be anything like other schools. He was right, of course. 

A full time offer in one of Denver's best school's, where the principal had told me the job was a sure thing and to quit other interviews, fell through due to an internal hire. After months of interviews that lasted into the summer I was offered a part-time position at a rough Title-1 high school. I took it. Part way into the semester I was offered a 1/4 time position at the feeder Jr. High, as their new hire had experienced a nervous break-down after just a few months. Up at the high school, the regular instructor had been there since the school opened in the 1978, and was becoming terrified of his students, and retired due to a heart condition and an incident where he mistakenly thought a student asking for after school help was threatening to kill him (meanwhile at the Jr High a student actually threatened to kill me, and we met with the principal and the campus police officer). I was offered the full time position at the high school for the next year and I took it, even though the pay was below poverty-line (the local paper included me in a piece on low payed professionals). 

I had made friends with the new Band teacher at the high school, and we joined forces and team-taught a humanities class. That year I also began the process of a large mural on the school's civic auditorium wall (this will have a page soon, when I have the slides transferred to digital). About here is where something unexpected and great happened. One of my top student's parents stopped in during a parent/teacher conference. His father quipped where my favorite place in Europe was for art, assuming I'd been there from what I'd taught in my classes. I told him Italy would be a great place to start. He was shocked to learn I'd never been abroad, and jokingly offered to have me come along with his family as their art guide, as he was a pilot and could bring me along on a buddy-pass. About a month later he gave me a call, and told me he hadn't been kidding. So I accompanied his family to Italy for an extended Spring Break, back in the mid-1990's, before the tourism was as crushing as it has become. Milan, Rome, Florence, and Pisa. The next year he brought me along to Paris. This brought a yawing contrast between a culture of art and personal direction in the arts, and the hard reality of the high school classroom. He and his son encouraged me to apply out to graduate schools again, and invited me to tour art schools with them that his son was considering. I applied out again, and was once again not accepted. I spent one more year teaching in the high school, then left my career as a teacher, to my surprise with 12 other teachers, many of whom had started there with me, including my Band teaching friend. I applied out to MFA programs one last time, this time putting in for my last-place fallback the University of Utah, and long after all the regular rejections had come back, I was accepted to Utah.

Without mentioning any specifics: after matriculation from my MFA I was interviewing for University work at the annual College Arts Association job fair held that year in New York City, I was called over to a Big University table as they had recognized me from their role as the lead university in reviewing the ongoing Accreditation for the art department of my MFA program. They told me they had been very impressed with me, wished they had an opening, and recognized and confirmed the significant deficiencies that I encountered. 

I completed my MFA, taught as an adjunct at University, competed for and was selected for a handful of public art commissions, and was hired to direct Salt Lake City's youth arts program including the Kennedy Center Imagination Celebration. Then the City dissolved the arts program a few years later, on the heels of the Kennedy Center dissolving theirs, and I strung together public art projects in ever expanding gaps of years and ever shrinking amounts. In the midst of all this I removed myself to Montana for six months, and supported my father as he passed away with cancer. My girlfriend of many years married me soon after, and we have a house in Salt Lake City with an attached sculpture studio. We have traveled to Italy and Paris with her family, and I have met again the works of art in what had seemed not long ago, but was more than a self ago, and still in their presence an awakening of a self that seems now as diminishing potential. 

Let's go back to my undergrad Ceramics professor's scenario of the art world and consider this public art instance: As a finalist for a national call, flown across the country and invited to a pre-presentation lunch with the other artists by the commissioning agency's representative. The rep. indicated to another finalist that they had prematurely promised him the commission and that their public process required an art selection committee vote, but not to worry about it, as it was just a formality. It was a corporate bully move, but I made my presentation and in reading the room knew I had a very good chance.  Since this was a public process funded with tax dollars I pulled up the committee transcript: the vote had gone to me and had been overridden by the commissioning agency, with a spurious argument that their art liability policy was cheaper for their favored artist- and the committee defaulted to the pre-selected selection. 

A few years later a former employee of a local government commissioning agency told me that a version of this process played out many times when I was voted to first position for significant work. A strange reversal of how this normally plays out can be seen in the last commission I procured, without being selected by the public art committee.   As a finalist I was able to present my idea to the committee and it was so well received that it splintered the process; another funding pool was found to procure my work, rather than the public art allocation. 

After a long dry spell for work that has yet to break, a well connected gallery owner told me that it had been decided that graduates in art of a regional non-accredited private university would be given preference for public commission work. They offered a condolence that the former head of a well known Utah museum confided that I was the best figure sculptor in the state. 

I was invited to show (for a fee) at a big art show in Great Falls, Montana, which I was hopeful about as I have some vestigial family roots in the area. I asked around, and this used to be a great art show, though it seemed no one who used to show there did so any more. I accepted. I created new work. I invented a modular system for the back of my little truck that layered the sculptures, then acted as a vast sculpture basing system for the showroom. Of course, nothing sold, and to sum up the experience; a 60-ish cowboy dandy (some feller's still dress up like it is 1885) zero'd in on a nude female figure, waved his Western Experience crowd onward, peeked around the room without seeing me, and commenced to giving the nude a vigorous finger blasting till he popped off, then scampered off to join his crew. This is the most serious attention my work received. 

I think of Rodin, telling Rainer Maria Rilke that his time as a young man hiking in the hills is his most important creative work, and I look at the image of my Patrol self, of summers working at the Boulder Watershed. This part, this summer mountain self, like so many valued selves, is never to return. The two glaciers I guarded are on a terminal path to obliteration, delisted as a glaciers to join the downward slide of the world into the 6th Mass Extinction, joined now by the ongoing pandemic of COVID Sars-2 and all its emerging variants. 

And what of the artistic muse that shifts the ground ever from a path? What of ancient Greece and the Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent and his Laurentian Era and the height of the Renaissance and all that has followed? What would I tell my university students in my art history classes now, if that academic self yet remained? Is it relevant to know that Rodin froze to death in his own home, fruitlessly begging his friends and gallerists and collectors to help him make a utility payment during the Great War- his working class roots betraying him at last? What if young sculptor Normal will never chance abroad to Florence and experience the internal earthquake of that great city? Or internalize Rome. Or Paris. Or New York. Would this internal absence be better, all things considered? And the absence of sculptor Normal altogether, who's work lives in a vacuum regardless? Is the vacuum of sculptor Normal's work more valuable to the pathless muse? What is the practice of art, and where can it lead when so far beyond the edge of all?