Bio

Photo by Terry Donnelly

I was born in 1945 & grew up on a wheat farm in Northwestern Kansas… the eldest son in a large extended family. 

I began painting on my grandmother’s enamel-topped kitchen table, and eventually majored in painting at the University of Denver, receiving a BFA in 1967, along with the Faculty Award for "highest marks & showing greatest promise".

During those college years I had a part-time job at a small jewelry shop & began picking up basic metal techniques. I continued to educate myself in workshop… asking questions, experimenting & following my own lights in my studio.

I discovered early on that I could support myself easier as a jeweler than as a painter. I set myself up in a studio… carving & casting “little operas” of jeweled gold & silver sculpture in which I played with both my clients’ visions & my own fantasies.

After more than a decade doing my own casting, I encouraged a friend to start a proper foundry with the equipment I had purchased, but wasn’t fully utilizing… Quite impulsively, I carved a bell as a first product to initiate the new foundry...

I quickly became fascinated by the improbable physics of making a miniature sculpture that rings. I am first a visual artist, a miniaturist, a jeweler, a sculptor in non-resonant wax. With little control over how they might sound in metal, I must follow the idea of a bell intuitively toward its ultimate musical resonance.

I am eclectic… my designs are responsive to many sources – nature, architecture, whimsey. I learn from historic styles & numeric concepts… plus all sorts of fantasy... More than 45 years of carving wax – living in Sedona, AZ & West Sonoma County, CA, Vashon Island and now Tacoma WA – has honed the skill required to realize remarkable detail with a passion I know to be unusual.

I have come to believe that the ancient archetype of bell wants to live more lively again... if I hadn't paid attention, the bells would have found someone else... Indeed, I am happy to know I am not alone in this enthrallment!