For most of my life I have had dual careers, both deriving from my love of rocks and my need to create -- my full-time career as a geologist, and my part-time one (until 1995) as a stone carver and sculptor.
Why only stone? Why not another 3-dimensional medium?
Because stone is unpredictable, irrevocable and unforgiving. Because stone challenges me and fights with me; it eludes me and plays with me; it demands that I treat it roughly to remove the excess, but once the form shows through, it requires that I caress it until its own smoothness emerges.
As a geologist, I respect the rocks that I carve and do not wish to disguise or hide their "rockness"...thus, I search to leave parts of them rough and natural where smoothness must not be. This aspect of my work is surely inspired by Michelangelo's four slave sculptures, which line the hallway leading to his "David", who perpetually struggle to emerge from their marble mass.
My work is also influenced by my fascination with the organic shapes of living things -- whether vegetal, animal or human -- and by the similarities among them. For example, the American photographer, Edward Weston, created his "Pepper" series in 1930. At about the same time, the superb French sculptor, Jean Arp, created abstract, sculptured bodies that are almost identical, in their fluidity, to the pepper photos. I strive to attain the same sense of living forms in my stones.
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