I was born in Texas in the beginning of the 1960’s. By the time I was a crayon-wielding kid, my mom could tell by the amount of graffiti on the living room walls that I wanted to be an artist.
In 1978 my parents sent me on a tour of Europe. I saw art everywhere and it changed the way I saw myself in relation to the world. The possibilities felt endless for who I could become. I returned to the U.S. and promptly ran away from home. I hitched a ride on the back of a Harley and found my way to the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. At this point I started on the path to learn what I did and didn’t want in my life. I made choices, suffered through parts of them but I eventually earned a BA in photography and ceramics. Through the photography I became interested in mask making. Then I got a college gig making masks for an opera colony, which lead to me producing my own masks.
In 1978 my parents sent me on a tour of Europe. I saw art everywhere and it changed the way I saw myself in relation to the world. The possibilities felt endless for who I could become. I returned to the U.S. and promptly ran away from home. I hitched a ride on the back of a Harley and found my way to the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. At this point I started on the path to learn what I did and didn’t want in my life. I made choices, suffered through parts of them but I eventually earned a BA in photography and ceramics. Through the photography I became interested in mask making. Then I got a college gig making masks for an opera colony, which lead to me producing my own masks.
1988 I went on to study mask making and mask design for Comedia del Arte Theatre in Arlesega Italy in the workshop of Donato Sartori. When I returned from Italy, I spent several years making masks, hats, and headdresses by the dozens and bringing them down to New Orleans to sell during Mardi Gras. I also made sculptural masks in paper mache which I sold in galleries. By 1993, I got bored of just making masks all the time. I started the search and decided I needed to go to Mexico to study sculpture and Spanish.
1994 I went to San Miguel de Allende to study lost wax for sculpture, but while there I also studied jewelry-making, lost wax casting, paper mache, puppetry, ceramics, and drawing. I stayed there for 16 years. I couldn’t get a real job back home so I opened my own gallery in 1995 and started soon after to sell my one of a kind sculptural jewelry. I hosted many exhibitions there over the years.
By the year 2000, for purposes of shear survival, I started part-time teaching paper mache, for mask making and sculpture, out of my studio there in San Miguel. I was pretty good at it. The teaching taught me a lot. I started volunteer teaching special needs children there in Mexico, which lead to an opportunity in 2004 and 2005 to facilitate art workshops with landmine victim kids in Quang Tri Province in Central Vietnam.
When I returned from Asia, after seeing the world and my country from the other side, and experiencing eastern culture and the beauty of it, I had a renewed inspiration to push further into my own work and what I wanted to say with it. The themes and the meaning of my pieces became important to me, I always want to tell a story.
