One glance at my work and the inspiration is very evident. My long history with horses could fill a telephone book. Let’s just say that horses are more than my muse. They are my blood brothers and sisters. I can feel their stories throbbing through my veins.
My process is simple. I pound the clay against a board, give it a little structure, and then wait for it to tell me what to do, which is the difficult part. What I have learned is the clay cannot be forced. Those pieces I have wrestled with pay me back by coming out of the kiln cracked. So I have learned to have patience. Sometimes the idea whispers to me at night so that in the morning I jump up to bring to life the image floating in my brain, not even needing a cup of coffee. An example of this is “Four-In-Hand-Fiasco”.
A piece is like a story to me, a very personal part of my own history that wants to become known. It is like writing a book where an author creates a character who suddenly leads the writer on all kinds of adventures. So it is with some of the pieces which became embodiments of that history, such as “Ode For Gold” which won New Jersey’s Guild Of Creative Art Sheean award, or “High Tide”, “Fence Line Ghosts”, “Green Broke”, which have won or received special recognition at the Aiken Artist Guild and Aiken Center for the Arts juried shows.
Formal training has been worked into a busy life raising a daughter who competed in the equine sport of eventing, while I competed in combined driving events. I’ve been fortunate to work with several open-minded and flexible professors while taking independent study classes at New York’s Tompkins County Community College and New Jersey’s Brookdale Community College. More recently I was given a working student position at the nationally acclaimed Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. Now I work from the back room of my house, a converted garden shed and the concrete pad behind the fireplace built with my father the chimney builder – Hot and Horses brought together.