Making art

I never intended to become an artist. In fact, it was my intention to go into the sciences—initially physics and later psychology—but art forced its way way out of me, completely unbidden. One result of this fact is, unlike most professional artists, I never formally studied art, relying instead on internally developed techniques and esthetic systems. To be sure, some of these turned out to be awkward and inappropriate, but in other cases my lack of background enabled me to shatter paradigms that training might have rendered too precious.

Although my first deliberate art experiments were in environmental sculpture and painting, I was early on drawn to jewelry, because it seemed a viable way to support myself, while still being creative. Despite this ultimately practical motivation, jewelry soon became my primary focus for esthetic explorations and I resolved to use technology to push the form into never before encountered realms.

I was successful in this endeavor. While the world-wide audience for my efforts was always small, as befits truly innovative work, many of them were highly placed in the art scene. My work has been exhibited in such venues as the Louvre, Paris, the Smithsonian, DC, the Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, as well as many other museums and galleries in North America, Europe and Asia. The work was also widely featured in books, magazines and on television.

While I was able to sell enough of the experimental work to make it "pay its way", it was never a big money maker, and I eventually started a small fashion jewelry company from which I made my living. This led to my becoming something of a schizoid jeweler: On the one hand I was creating extremely sophisticated, technology intensive work of a kind never before seen, while on the other hand I was creating items popular enough to sell by the thousands. Perhaps it was inevitable that I could not keep this up forever- at any rate I ceased making art in any meaningful sense by the early 90s.

The following pages contain selected examples of various aspects of my output:

Cybernetic jewels LCD jewels Titanium jewels Gold jewels Various art