First off — if you are overcome with a sense of inadequacy and despair as you review my glorious website, no need for FOMO, you can have the same! Write me on the contact page and I’ll put you in touch with my genius web designer Joe Dahle.
If there’s any confusion, this is not a sales site — a lot of the pieces have already been sold, or are favorite pieces that I want to keep. It’s more of an overview of different things I’ve made over the years.
MOSAICS
To me, the greatest part of making mosaics is the endless variety of materials – hundreds of colors and textures of glass and mirrors… broken ceramics and hardware and photos under glass…. tiles and beads and rocks and shells and bottle-caps and wood – nothing is off limits. Even more fun – seeing how things that have no business keeping company (for example a drill bit, a piece of azure blue glass, and a photo of a Pomeranian) will interact and hopefully supercharge each other when they are glued down side by side and unified by grout. When you consider that you can use anything from a piece of wood to a Chevy as your “canvas,” the options are almost infinite.
I started mosaicking innocently enough – back in 1997, I wanted to put Saltillo tiles on the patio of my house, so I took one of those classes they give wannabe DIY-ers at Home Depot on Saturday mornings. Installing the tiles involved renting a wet saw; there were a couple hours left before we had to return it so I started noodling with the leftover tiles and some scraps from a backsplash my wife had installed. I made a very primitive mosaic and became completely smitten by the materials and the process; I especially loved it because (like the handmade Saltillo tiles I worked with) imperfection and approximation seemed to enhance the beauty of your piece! (I blab about this more on the Miscellaneous page.) I bought a pair of tile nippers and some loose tiles, then started going to stores where you could buy broken tiles by the pound, and then I started adding stones and shells and Scrabble tiles. The biggest turn for me came when my wife gave me a workshop class at the Stained Glass Store in Eagle Rock for my birthday. Every Thursday night a bunch of people would sit and make mosaics for hours, and it became the highlight of my week. Eventually I took workshops at the Institute of Mosaic Art in Oakland, with a few different teachers like Sonia King, Jeannie Houston Antes, Ellen Blakely, and Kelly Knickerbocker. Then I started taking classes with Laurel Skye and her daughter Marley Goldman at their house in northern California; I went up there about 12 times over the next few years. Laurel was unquestionably my biggest influence, opening my mind to a million new things and paving the way for me to take techniques I’d learned elsewhere, combine them with my imagination, and weave it all together into my mosaics.
I’ve been working in Phoenix since 2011; one of the highlights has been my affiliation with the Shemer Art Center, where I’m frequently able to show pieces and sell them in the gift shop; in the last few years I’ve done demos and taught a few workshops there as well.