Bio

​The weave of my love for drawing and my exposure to culture began in my teens. Geraldine Turner, my high-school art teacher, recognizing that my academic studies were not a priority for me, enrolled me in life drawing classes at Scripps College and Pomona College, Claremont, California. Geraldine Turner was a graduate student at the Claremont Graduate University. She opened a door for me, and I am eternally grateful to her. 

Faculty at Scripps and Pomona furthered my knowledge of a larger world. I saw every exhibition curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum, every new show at Ferus Gallery and Dwan Gallery. In another extracurricular drawing class at the Los Angeles Art Center School, my favorite painter John Altoon would visit and draw with us. Richard Diebebkorn’s grandmother, Nellie Fryer, gave me the top floor of her barn to use as a painting studio. During the sixties the Southern California contemporary art world was small and personal. 

 In 1964, I moved to San Francisco to attend the San Francisco Art Institute where new possibilities for art making were presented to me. Kathan Brown, Manuel Neri, Wally Hedrick and Bruce Conner became important teachers. James Reineking had the most lasting impact on my work. Bruce Nauman was given one of his first teaching jobs at SFAI, His insights, even then, were intriguing. Thanks to a board member who had access to the stacks at the de Young Museum, I did the bulk of my art history work with the Avery Brundage Collection of Asian Art in the de Young.

 After a year at SFAI my art making youth hit an abrupt and shattering reality. As a part-time student, due to the necessity to work in order to pay tuition, I was classified as 1-A by the US Department of Defense draft board. The Vietnam war was raging. I was ‘called up’. After serving two years in the US Navy, including eleven months of combat duty in Vietnam, I received an honorable discharge and the GI Bill. I returned to SFAI, built a foundry/studio in a corrugated steel shack on the west side of Berkeley and resumed full immersion into my art making. 

 In 1970 I took a job as an assistant to the American ceramicist, Peter Voulkos, who had begun to make monumental bronze pieces. I was raised by an adoptive father, a master machinist who taught me metal fabrication at an early age. The assistantship with Voulkos was a fit. During my two-year tenure with Voulkos, I was privileged to enjoy visits to my studio by contemporary curators and gallerists from both coasts. Here are two career consequences of those studio visits:

 1973, first solo museum exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, director Henry Hopkins.

1975, inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, curators Marcia Tucker and James Monte.

CV