ARTIST

"Finding and collecting curiosities in thrift stores and junkyards is a lifelong preoccupation and a passionate experience for me, rather like going to church.  Three or four times a month I visit one of Tucson’s four junkyards.  I walk around alone, looking at the forlorn piles of bent, twisted and rusted metal lying all over the place.  Now things start to happen very fast; everywhere I look I begin to see metal transformed into finished sculptures.

"Most of my sculptures are conceived right there in the scrap metal yards where I find both the vision and the ingredients for my work.  I just see a piece of metal and immediately imagine the completed sculpture it suggests.  Most of the time, on one visit I am able to locate all of the actual metal parts which will be necessary to complete many sculptures, but occasionally an exciting piece of rusted metal will languish in my studio yard for months, waiting for the day I will find the piece of pieces that are missing.

"When I discard something, I betray it.  When I find it, conceive a vision of it renewed, and make art from it, I redeem it.  All objects have the potential to be redeemed through art, to be transformed through human vision.  So do all people.  If a person were to be discarded like a piece of rusted steel, it would be a profound experience.  But if it happens to an object, everyone takes it to be insignificant.  I can’t accept that.  Art makes my own personal redemption possible."