About the Artist
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I began learning about art in high school. I have always been a deep thinker and socially ineffective. I became fascinated with clay and spent all my free time in the Art room. By my junior year, I had received several Gold Key’s in the National High School Scholastic Art Competition, and was the first person in our school to receive finalist honors in the National show. My mother had past away during my junior year at school, and being the fifth of seven children – two younger sisters and my older brothers and sister either away at school or on their own, I felt isolated. I used pottery as therapy to comfort my great loss. I received two more finalist my senior year. Making things with clay was the one thing that I knew I could do as well as or better than any of my peers.
I was accepted at Illinois State University and began an Art degree in the Spring of 78. I enrolled in my first ceramics class in college and my instructor suggested that I just move into ceramics III. My ability to throw far exceeded my ability to socialize. It seemed to me that the "clicks" had already been formed in previous semesters. Although my ability to throw was equal to the graduate students, my knowledge of the chemistry of ceramics was not as well developed. I felt like an outsider. I participated in a local Art Fair, set up a booth, and did demonstrations. A man walked up to the crowd around me and said to his son, "Look Johnny, there's the man who makes pots." I was rather immature in my thinking as I thought to myself , "Is that all there is to life, to be know as the man who makes pots." This bothered me so much I left clay for a while and began to expand my artistic abilities.
I studied painting and color theory, drawing, and life sculpture. I was enrolled in Art History at the same time I was taking advanced sculpture. A piece I was working on a relief of two boxers that had metamorphisized into a life sized female figure in a twisting - dancing pose. The Chairman of the Art department would often give tour through the sculpture studio. Then one day I was told that my sister was pregnant. I excited to hear the news and as a result, I made my dancing figure pregnant. The chairman stopped giving tours in the advanced sculpture studio. Then one day I during history class we were talking about Greek pottery and one of the paintings on the pottery was about the gods of Greece killing the children of Niobe, a city near what is called Istanbul today. I fashioned arrow out of some welding rod and placed it in the abdomen of the dancing figure and changed the smile to a grimace. The imagery was extremely powerful. The reaction from my peers was so negative I changed it back. In hind sight, I regret that decision. One of the main purposes of art is to evoke a reaction and cause people to respond. That piece did just that, and powerfully.
My favorite period in painting is the time between the impressionist to the abstract expressionists. I began experimenting with fluorescent color and incorporating them with my regular palette of colors. Since there were no fluorescent paints available at the time, I made my own. For an installation piece, I made a school of papermache' fish. I hung them in the drawing studio at different heights and sprinkled small flat sticks across the floor, all of the pieces were painted with different fluorescent colors. With black light and otherwise total darkness, the effect made you feel like you were under water. My experiments with color were ill received by my instructor and peers. About 8 or 10 years later I began seeing paintings in galleries that were much like my painterly style in college. It seems my painting style was about 8 or 10 years too early.
One of the last pieces of art that I made before leaving art for so many years was a 6 foot by 8 foot ceramic raku mural. The Title was "Heads of State - 1984." Across the top were Reagan, Schultz, Peres, Schamire, Chenyenco, and Gromeko. Across the bottom was Mubarak, Arafat and Komeni. I made a Raku kiln that looked like a pizza oven, and completed the piece from start to finish in two weeks. I was very angry at world government and mailed a letter and slide off to the Networks and political parties. My response was a short note from the republican party encouraging me to vote.
I was living in a third floor flat that I had converted into a studio. I lived almost a year to the day without electricity. I used oil lamps for light, a white gas stove for cooking and a cylinder shaped kerosene heater for heat. The heat from the 1st and 2nd floors kept my space above freezing in the winter. It was my "Walden Pond," but in the city. I still felt like an outcast from the local art scene, except for a few close friends. I used to love to sit on the roof tops and watch the sunsets and the people and traffic below. I did finally get electricity, but I never did get heat. I was rather upset with the progression of political events and was certain that Nuclear War would destroy life as we know it. It still can. So, I got creative. I drew up an outline of what I was calling " the University of Applied Life." I designed and Ark. The structure would have been enormous. It would have been about a fifth of a mile in diameter, about twenty one stories high or deep, and in an angular yet oval shape. The idea was to have a kind of floating city with a sealed environment that maintained itself by recycling everything, while being powered by the sea. I had formulated a plan on how to achieve feat. I thought about where I wanted to be and went in reverse, thinking about what I needed to do to get to each level, until I had gone back to the level that I was at, flat broke. Then as I began my third year there, the tenants on the first and second floors moved out and the landlord skipped town because he had several properties with balloon payments that were in default. The city had turned the water was turned off for they did not know anyone was living up there. No heat and no water made life rather difficult. Here, I had designed a plan to save life as we know it and I could not even take care of my self.
That's when I became a Christian. Nobody brainwashed me. I stood on top of the roof of my downtown flat and looked up and said, "I don't know what I'm doing anymore; God if your up there, please show me what to do." It was then that I moved to St. Paul Minnesota. After this event I began illustrating the book of Revelation. I tried to draw pictures of the imagery that was presented. I had many questions and if I was to show the drawings to a large audience, I thought to myself that I had better know how to answer those questions. After completing the drawings I was so moved that I returned to school at earned another BS in Communications and a minor in Bible from North Central Bible College.
After over ten years, the drawings are finally available for viewing here at my web site. Concerning ceramics and other artistic mediums, for the past four or five years I have been trying to set up a studio and have run into one road block after another. I've finally found a suitable place to live with a large enough place for a studio. Many of the forms I've been working on recently are altered. I enjoy manipulating thrown forms with tools or my fingers. I still am only able to make stuff in my spare time, but I hope to have enough work to be able to participate in a few art fairs and begin pursuing galleries to show my work. I have also been wanting to get started on a series of paintings dealing with judgment. At this time, I have several canvases waiting for time and paint. The reason the topic of judgment is so important to me is I love the idea of creative life, but hate the idea of senseless loss. I often have a hard time dealing with enormous potential senselessly lost. I hope that this site evokes a reaction and causes you to respond.
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