Biography

I was born in New York City in September, 1943.  At the tender age of 11 my family moved to a sleepy town in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.  Staunton is a town that looks like its postcards.  I graduated from high school in Staunton in 1961 and received a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia in 1966.  For the next two years I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, teaching auto mechanics, in French, in a small rural technical school in Yamoussoukro, a town, at that time, of about 4000 people.  In the summer of 1968 I had a really tough job training new Peace Corps Volunteers in Aniere, just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. 

Jeannie and I met at orientation for new school teachers in Buffalo, New York and were married in March, 1969.  We taught in Buffalo for two years and then moved to Bloomington, Indiana where I worked on a Ph.D. in American Fiction and Poetry and Jeannie received a Masters in Library Science.  We lived in Bloomington until 1979 and in Pensacola ever since. 

In 1981, I began taking sculpture classes from Michael Boles at PJC.  It began as a lark, quickly progressed to a serious hobby, and then became a passion.  I was working a day job and making art most evenings until midnight and most of my weekends.  Unable to keep up this pace much past the age of 50 (I fell asleep at work twice) I made that most foolish of all possible decisions and quit my day job in August of 1995.

The highlights of my artistic career include winning the first Cinco Banderas purchase award from the Arts Council of Northwest Florida.  In 1995 I received my first commission and designed and built the three dimensional Star of David at 9^th and Mallory.  More recently, in 2006 I completed a large (13 ½ feet) sculpture located in front of the fine arts building at Okaloosa Walton College in Niceville,  Florida.  In March of this year I completed and installed a fairly large indoor sculpture in the atrium of the College of Public Health, University of Arkansas for Medical Science in Little Rock.

During the past 25 years I have been a frequent participant in the Great Gulfcoast Arts Festival, the Cinco Banderas Show, as well as numerous shows and outdoor festivals in the south such as the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Show, Coconut Grove Art Festival and as far as Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I have pieces in private collections from California to Michigan, Virginia to Key West.