I have been drawing abstract shapes since I was a child. My father, an appreciator of non-representational art, would often admire the wild twists and turns of my early drawings, exclaiming,” Wow! Isn’t that something!” I don’t think he ever said the old, more mundane, “What is it?” Spurred on by such encouragement I became a young creator of shapes.
At about age eleven my father gave me a book, “The Art of Jean Arp,” a book I treasure to this day. I think my father recognized that I had a kindred spirit in the German born artist. I poured through this book over and over again. I consider Jean Arp my mentor, and feel he continues to have a profound influence on my art. Music is another strong influence for my visual art; I studied the clarinet at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music at Appleton, Wisconsin.
As a self-taught printmaker, I have been making prints for nearly two decades. Combining my work experiences of woodworking design and intaglio printmaking, I developed a plate-cutting technique in which I use an intricate-cutting scroll saw to cut my plates. The designs for my prints come to me spontaneously in the moment, the same way my abstract drawings come to me. The saw is my pen. Each plate cut is kind of a dance of shapes that relate and interact with each other. My forms, to be sure, have been influenced by the natural forms I see in nature, and in a less obvious way from my love of the rhythm and balance I find in movement and music. Often I am surprised by the shapes and forms that seem to magically come out of the ether onto the plate.
I hand roll the ink onto each shape of an individual plate, and reassemble them, before putting them through the printing press. The colors, of course, add a whole new dimension to the piece, and I generally do quite a bit of experimentation before settling on a palate that inspires me. Art is essential for me, and I hope that others find joy in these explorations into the abstract, as I do in the creating of them.