Art & Photography

Welcome to my portfolio of woodworking and furniture design, theatrical set design, digital and film photography, and analogue small-gauge filmmaking. Also featuring my paintings and drawings, and the public art installations and murals completed while working with children in early arts education workshops. I’ve spent my life building an independent enterprise that relies on ingenuity and creativity as its main driving force, and while it hasn’t always been a linear journey or an easy lift, I still have complete faith in the remarkable transformative power of a creative life powered by a free imagination.

The trick is to nurture that creative spirit, and find a way to live in the practical world of family and children and a meaningful everyday life. For me that was my furniture design and woodworking business, which I’ve operated out of my home studio for the last thirty years. Merging my life and work gave me the freedom to pursue some of the life-skills that were so vitally important to previous generations, but seem curiously absent from the modern experience. The workshop is the ultimate teacher and guide to self-reliance, and the skills learned there transfer across every aspect of life, so we tried to live simply and provide for ourselves as much as possible. Traditional Arts & Crafts like woodworking have a deep cultural reach in this country, and the skills and ethics learned by that honest work exemplify the American ideal of a virtuous agrarian society shepherded by skilled journeymen.

I’ve tried to have the same approach to my woodworking business, but the two worlds of art and commerce often collide and the modern economy almost always dominates. There are precious few incentives to carry on with the cultural traditions and the now quaint ideas of quality and authenticity, and too much reliance on the inhumane machinations of the market economy. So the first things to go are quality materials, skilled technique, and the status and quality of life for artists and craftspeople. The old universal life-skills that almost every working person possessed at one time, and the philosophy behind them, began to fade into history as the pursuit of economic advantage and materialism took over. So now, as my life transitions into something new and the workshop will soon be closed and recede into memory, the most difficult part is losing the sense of identity that was shared with my father and grandfathers. But you have to be hopeful that the seeds of self-reliance and independence will take root in the hearts of your children, because they’re the ones who will dream up and create a better future for us all.

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis