"Blue Shroom" Sculpture

I'm an artist who works in clay. It's my passion but it was not always that way.

I have been a professional artist for my entire adult life. I grew up in a rural community in northern Illinois. After serving in the military, I attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where I studied printmaking, oil painting, drawing, and sculpture. I graduated with a BFA degree in 1981.

Between 1988 and 2006, I lived in Chicago with my wife and son. I created several watercolor series that captured the city's viaducts, roadways, and bridge structures. My final series, "The Little Things," was produced from 2003 to 2006 and focused on objects of personal and social interest. One of the paintings from this series is part of the permanent collection at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. The now-defunct Struve Gallery in Chicago represented me.

From 1999 to 2003, I taught watercolor and drawing at SAIC and served as an Assistant Professor of Drawing and Watercolor at Columbia College in Chicago. In 2006, the Fine Arts Department of Columbia College invited me to teach watercolor painting in Florence.

After living in Chicago for over 25 years, my wife and I moved to northwest Indiana in 2006. In 2008, we founded BlackTree Studio Pottery to devote myself to working in clay. As a mature artist, I knew my aesthetics; I simply changed my medium and brought my painting and printmaking sensibility to it. I never learned what I should not do, and I have successfully been exploring the natural colors and textures of clay through sculptural forms since the founding of the studio. In 2010, my sculptural and functional pottery earned me the official designation of Indiana Artist from the Indiana Arts Commission.