"In graduate school my print making teacher asked whether I was a renderer or a mark maker. I had not heard the distinction "mark maker" before, and it came to me as a relief. I had rendered people and things over the years, and somewhat successfully, but over and over again I was drawn to explore freed up gestures as well as playing with various materials—mixing, pouring, brushing  paint, shaping  clay, heating and bending steel, carving wood. But I also loved what the materials themselves had to say. The edgy creep of rust across steel, the rivered hard grain of oak, paint's willingness to yield while leaving its mark fascinated me.

And while I continue to write a poem or two on occasion, I find words and the syntax of language too constraining, or perhaps too linear. The immediacy and energy communicated in a splat of paint, or the difference between a broad stroke of red or a trundling drip of black captures more than ideas, or even feelings. They express something of the nature of reality outside my understanding of it. In this way I am rescued and healed by art, as the materials make demands, display essence, embody dynamics, communicate and reflect possibility as they reveal inherent beauty. For me, making art is an activity of unfolding reality. This unfolding is at times aggravating, at times thrilling, and at other times soothing. In the end, if I've managed to hang in there, an enlivening and healing alchemy occurs. Sometimes the process is over in days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months. Each finished piece is an invitation and pathway into that alchemy. I make these pieces out of love, literally. Life’s love for me, its love for all of us."