Visual Bio

NOTE: If you've received a double-sided business card with a photo of my gift to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, on the 10th anniversary of his 1st tweet, please skip over the following paragraph, which duplicates that information.

"I consider myself to be politically progressive historically, but I’ve always had conservative friends because I think the only way our great country will move ahead is to find common ground. To that end, I’ve launched an art project with Twitter at @OccupyTheOne and @EarthOrb, where I publish daily “truisms” (many not even a little political) that encapsulate a proposition and conclusion about some issue that I believe impacts our society. The sculptural aspect of these “truisms” take physical form as Tweetures sculpture that I diagram on Facebook, with links from both of my Twitter accounts. Please check out Tweetures.com (you're already there;-) or write me: tweetures@gmail.com."

To continue: This website is incomplete, but will eventually contain more images of my latest work, including a relatively inexpensive ($160) piece of "Weaponized Sculpture," specifically, a light-weight vicious dog whacker, with an available quick-release nylon-web holster that can be worn and deployed while riding a bike. The 28"-long sword-like whacker has no sharp edges, but reflects light in an artistic manner, using my original technique for texturing aluminum. (Sadly, this embryonic idea died in the proverbial womb!) In the meantime, please check out my visual bio. Explanatory captions are under each image.

I single-handedly built my Denver sculpture studio from two kits - a single- and a double-car garage - on my parents' property, making an L-shaped structure with an unobstructed main room measuring 24' by 24'. My dad owned a locksmithing company and trained me to operate his business after he broke his arm. I did that for a few years, but it wasn't my "thing!" The arched opening used to be an exhaust fan, and the diamond-shaped skylight has a big brother on the opposite wall measuring about 12' wide by 4' high. (Recent photo provided by the amazing Google Street View!)

This is the 'to scale' line drawing of the "Cattails" security grill I designed for Mitten Gates, a wealthy Denver rubber heiress and my father's client. I copied it onto a transparency and with an overhead projector enlarged the image onto the floor of my Denver studio's main room, where I drew life-size artboard panels that guided the complex Tungsten Inert Gas (or TIG) aluminum welding process under heat-resistant tempered glass.

Mitten Gates' architect-designed home was razed by a subsequent owner, presumably destroying the "Cattails" window, along with an abstract textured aluminum "Tree" that I created to replace a dead Dutch Elm which had grown up through a large opening in her back porch roof, though I have apparently lost any photographs of it.

This fuzzy photograph from Google Street View shows a recent image of my textured aluminum "Triceratops" sculpture from the same era as the Gates sculpture, in front of my massive Boulder sculpture studio which I designed and built with a crew, but only lived in for a few years. My sister roped me into buying her soon to be ex-husband's share of their property so she wouldn't have to sell her share, and I was into designing and building structures back then! The "Triceratops" and "Tree" sculptures were textured in the manner of a stainless steel David Smith sculpture - with a swirling pattern to remove the dull milled finish of the aluminum - before I developed my own technique for texturing aluminum.

This overhead shot from Google Earth shows my former 2,400 square foot two-bedroom Boulder studio, with its up to 20' high cathedral ceilings, attached to my sister's 3,600 square foot four-bedroom suburban ranch home, counting the garage and full basement. The flat-roofed connecting structure housed a large circular cedar hot tub and a 6' diameter domed Plexiglas window with a great view of the Colorado Rockies' Front Range. Unfortunately, my sister and I have parted ways.

These two photographs show the raising of "Outlet," an original 18' tall textured aluminum sculpture fabricated from 2" by 6" thick-walled rectangular tubing, which was my first major effort at creating truly public outdoor sculpture. (I'm the dude inexplicably clad in a blue hoodie on the day of the Summer Solstice!)

One of the most challenging tasks surrounding the installation of "Outlet" for City Electric was convincing the Boulder Zoning Department that it was, in fact, original sculpture, and not a commercial sign of some sort!

Mr. George Bernsen, the original owner of City Electric (standing at the far right), was kind enough to trade me for a substantial portion - $6,000 - of their fee for providing my studio with 220 volt, 3-phase industrial-grade wiring, which the power company brought in underground to preserve our view of the Front Range of the Rockies. Mr. Bernsen was a real art patron and loved "Outlet!"

Sadly for all concerned, Mr. Bernsen was killed several years later piloting a single-engine aircraft over the hills above Boulder, and his non-art lover son (who thought his dad was a nut case for commissioning my work) tore "Outlet" down and sold it for scrap when he moved his father's business from 28th Street to Louisville, CO.

Fortunately for me, Dave Davis, the former Director of the Western Colorado Center for the Arts, saw "Outlet" before it was torn down and invited me to participate in his annual "Art on the Corner" outdoor sculpture show, sited throughout downtown Grand Junction, where he featured this flash photo of "SDI: Some Dumb Idea" on Page #1 of that year's show catalog. (Dave liked "SDI" a lot! I love his photograph because it captures a moment in time, with the streaking taillights of passing cars in this time-lapse flash photograph!)

"SDI" was my gently mocking response to President Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative," though Israel's recent "Irondome" missle defense system has definitely softened my view of history, since it's based on that earlier technology. After I moved to Philly to live with my future wife, Dave Davis acquired my work for their permanent collection with a $10,000 tax valuation, which I happily accepted for my gift to the museum, and it survives to this moment in time, looking virtually the same as the day I completed its fabrication years ago.

Going backward in time, this is my first piece of original sculpture - a leftover length of 1/4" by 3/4" aluminum flat bar from the "Cattails" security window - which I rolled into a S-shaped recurve and textured in a manner I found interesting. My texturing technique entails creating bands of three silvery diamond shapes (starting at the top left of the photo), followed by three dark gray diamonds on both 3/4" faces of the recurve, with alternating silvery and dark gray triangles on both 1/4" edges, to be repeated along the length of the sculpture. Interestingly, the deep grooves in the surface of the aluminum act as a kind of polarizing device, where a slight change in one's viewpoint reverses the coloration, with silvery areas becoming dark gray and dark gray areas changing to bright silver, a mysterious process that happens instantaneously.

The unceremonious destruction of "Outlet" was disappointing, but a crime against sculpture occurred in New York City, when a group of tenants and employees at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on Foley Federal Plaza agitated to have world-famous Richard Serra's 1981 "Tilted Arc" (financed by the GSA's 1% Arts-in-Architecture program) dismantled after a lawsuit and removed because folks couldn't see each other across the plaza when eating lunch! The artist refuses to erect this fantastic site-specific sculpture anywhere else.

This is my humorous homage to Richard Serra's work. It represents a full embrace of his destroyed "Tilted Arc" masterpiece by my original artwork (titled "Recurve" of course), with the textured aluminum sculpture seeming to levitate above the now barren Foley Plaza floor.

Here's an even larger version of "Recurve," which appears to be resting against "Tilted Arc," but is in fact (not;-) floating above it using a massive electromagnet that repels the physical magnets embedded in the textured aluminum sculpture itself. My totally fantastic goal is to crowd-fund this huge project to repair the seriously damaged karma of Foley Plaza, but I'm not holding my breath!

More realistically, the crowd-funded textured aluminum "Recurve" would be sited in the Foley Plaza fountain to discourage gawkers who might be crushed if the concealed electromagnet under the floor of the water-filled pool ever had its power cut off. I have not heard back from a famous physics professor, Brian Greene, to see if this is feasible, but future lunchtime viewers should be OK with it in any case, and it might save them from the Demons of Art Haters for rejecting "Tilted Arc!"

THANK YOU to Professor Brian Greene for not getting back to me, thus confirming what an impossibly terrible idea my first thoughts about the levitating "Recurve" represented! There is NO WAY such a large electromagnet could practically function, so I came up with a different idea, to mount an extremely lightweight aluminum recurve on a massive brushed stainless steel cone, with the tilted recurve free to rotate in the wind on a heavy-duty axle and bearing assembly at the top of the conical base. (I've always been into mobiles! FYI, this link leads to an antique website that I designed when computer monitors measured 9" or 10" diagonally!) The biggest advantage is that it would NOT require a connection to the electrical grid, so safety would be assured. Foley Plaza is in desperate need of a karmic reboot, and this newer design is definitely feasible.

Here's an early design for a lady's belt buckle that I repurposed as a funky unisex neckpiece after losing interest in the original belt design. (I had planned to give it to my wife's best friend, who ended up betraying her, costing her job as a consultant and therapist for the Salvation Army homeless shelter network in Philly. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of that person or that organization!) I wore it to a Wally Workman Gallery opening in downtown Austin, where the owner generously admired it.

That same textured aluminum buckle design inspired a new line of simplified sculpture I call Tweetures (pronounced "twee-chers"), after my weird, long-standing obsession for always tweeting with exactly 140 characters - never less - even with Twitter's new 280 character limit! I gifted this second Tweetures design to Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, on the 10th anniversary of his first tweet, though I never heard back from him, which was unsurprising for a busy tech billionaire. It was titled "All About Twitter."

This first Tweetures design, titled "All About Austin," is a photographic mock-up of the actual 18" tall scale model in front of the Wally Workman Gallery, though the dark gray laser-engraved lettering doesn't show up well in this photo. My eventual proposal to her and her partner will be to install an 18' tall outdoor sculpture in the gallery's front yard, sited in a buried 6" by 18" by 48" stainless steel pocket nested in reinforced concrete so the work could ideally be sold and replaced without digging up the gallery's lawn again. Definitely feasible!