When I meet someone who really enjoys their vocation, I like to ask them when they knew they were interested in that field. More often than not, they will recall a story from their childhood. A friend of mine recalled cooking with his grandma, and knowing that from that time he wanted to be a chef and make people happy with food.

If someone asked me when I knew I wanted do art, I would go back to my childhood. In 2nd grade. I was the 2nd best dinosaur drawer, and in 4th grade I was able to draw the Eifel Tower in person on a family trip to Europe. Through grade school I continued to draw. Later I was able to take some photography classes in high school that I really enjoyed (back then we used darkrooms). Of all the experiences in school art was the most interesting and attractive to me. So naturally, by the time I signed up for college at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, an art major was the only path I wanted for me.

However, it wasn’t until the beginning of my senior year in college that I felt the calling to do art for my lifetime, and possibly for a living. I find this is difficult to convey to someone who has not had an encounter with God. The best way to describe the experience is that I did not have any tricks up my sleeve. I wanted to serve the God I had come to know, with what I had—and all I really had was art. I didn’t feel like I was much good at it either! But with a strong desire and several external confirmations, I jumped into pursuing art with everything I had. After this commitment, I experienced a confirmation in my soul that I could only compare to the experience of making my dad proud of me.

After college, I was encouraged by my professors to pursue a Master’s in Art. I did not pursue more education at that time, though, because I wanted to get out and start living life and making art outside the university walls. Within two years I was married and working in a bronze foundry pouring metal.

When I began my foundry career I was enamored with the figure. I discovered that many figurative artists work with bronze and I was living very close to two art foundries. My first position was with Carol Satriani at Tallix West foundry in Oakland, California. I was so excited to be working with bronze sculptures created by real artists! In college I had spent many hours drawing and sculpting figures and I finally had a chance to make my creations out of bronze! Unfortunately, my time at Tallix West was very short. They shut the doors to that place within weeks of my hiring. However, I was fortunate to be hired soon after at Artworks Foundry in Berkeley.

My primary job was on the pour team. This team was a group of three people that handled the melting and pouring of the molten metal, which was fine with me. I liked the hard work and it was really intense. Pouring molten metal for the first time was a huge adrenaline rush, and a lot like skydiving for the first time. And after 24 years and pouring over 250, 000 tons of bronze. I still enjoy the focused attention that pouring metal requires. In Berkeley we were casting works for artists such as Larry Noble, Elizabeth McQueen, Eugene Daub, Robert Graham and many others. My first bronze works were figurative. As I learned my craft and experimented, I found my figures going in a particular direction. Then came the day when I realized my work was following a similar path as a customer of the foundry. Stephen DeStaebler was already doing work in the same direction I was going. The path I was traveling had already been explored.

I was crushed. I felt like a waiter bringing an appetizer tray to a table that had just finished desert. Now, I knew Stephen. He was a very kind and helpful person to me in several ways. I loved his work, but I did not want to follow an already paved street.

I went into a brief time of mourning. I don’t remember how long it was. I had invested a lot of time in studying the figure, and bringing myself to the conclusion that I needed to change direction was difficult. I knew I must continue to make art. I still worked at a foundry surrounded by amazing materials and tools. I was still surrounded by amazing artists that I worked with and worked for. My themes and concepts didn’t need to change. Christian theology, social/personal commentaries were the concepts I was working with before my crisis and I wanted to keep those. But what would suffice as a new muse? What forms could I employ that could grab the imagination like the human figure?

As it turned out, I was surrounded by this new focus for inspiration: energy. At the foundry I was using tools that were very powerful and intimidating. The energy that surrounded me ranged from kinetic, to thermal, to electromagnetic. As I thought about the immense amounts of energy I was working around, I started to consider the energy we are immersed in everyday of today’s society. And on a grander scale, I considered the energy that surrounds our earth, inside and out, all the way into the deep chasm of space. We ourselves are bundles of highly structured, highly organized energy. Energy is everywhere and in everything.

But, so what?! So energy is everywhere. How the heck does one sculpt ‘energy’? I received a dramatic answer to that question one day at work.

It was 1993, and we were pouring metal (see video for a demo)when a ceramic shell mold, that we poured about fifty pounds of metal into, broke open at the bottom and all the liquid bronze spilled onto the floor. It was pretty scary and intense, but no one was injured. However, we had lost a ceramic shell and that was not good. Ironically, it was a Stephen DeStaebler piece. All I could do was let the metal cool off and drag the piece away to melt it down later. When I moved it I found the large single piece of bronze had preserved every action of the metal rushing out of the mold. It was a big splash that I could pick up. It was perfect. All of that energy had solidified in that moment of action. It was a snapshot of fluid dynamics made of bronze. I had my new form!

With my new direction I quickly renewed my interest in astronomy. I had been interested in space for several years prior, primarily, because thinking of deep space made me feel small. Space seemed so huge. When I was a kid I saw Gumby and Poky go into space (The Small Planets episode) and I thought it seemed so quiet and a little scary. So thinking of space for me was kind of like going into a haunted fun house. It made me feel a little uneasy, but in a fun way.

At this time the U.S. space program was having great success. The Hubble Space Telescope was newly up and running, and sending pictures back to earth. Because of this, the nature of the universe was changing right before our eyes, or at least our understanding of it was. Pictures of super novae, binary star systems and galaxies upon galaxies were being discovered, while theoretical physicists were trying to put the pieces together and make sense of all the data. Black holes were the subjects of conversation on NPR. Talk about energy! Black holes were officially the new favorite nightmare of energy.

Well, with these themes buzzing in my head I looked at my new found ‘splash’ art and thought it looked like the remnants of a super nova. So I put a hanger on it, and attached some spheres, put some color on it, and that was the beginning of ‘splash’ art. I felt like all of space was open to me as a muse. But it wasn’t just space.

The search was on for the Grand Unified Theory in the world of science. Finding a unity between quantum mechanics and general relativity was fascinating to me. To this day, scientists are still trying to bridge the gap of understanding between these concepts. I had decided that all the strangeness of the quantum world was fair game for my work as well.

After discovering my new direction I was very motivated to experiment, and find unconventional ways to use the tools and processes at the foundry. I won’t describe all the things I have tried because it would be too much boring shoptalk. But I will say that I have tried many things and have continued to experiment with different materials and processes.

During this time of experimentation my wife and I had our first child. I mention this because becoming a father affected my outlook on life and my art in a profound way. I took my role as a father very seriously and felt that my family must get the best of my time. However, I knew I had to continue pursuing art because it was my calling. So my art time shrank, but I became more focused with the time that I had. Occasionally, I would agonize over the time I wasn’t doing art. However, now that I am a grandpa and my kids are doing well, I don’t regret the time spent with them at all!

In the late 90’s I began to play with moving art. Videos by the Survival Research Laboratory guys and by the Swiss duo, Peter Fischli and David Weiss (The Way Things Go, 1987), had been simmering in my mind for some time. I was intrigued by each group’s videos, and they had kindled a desire in me to put movement to some of my work. I had done a couple spinning sculptures by this time, but I wanted to try something that was more challenging.

In 1997 I met my birth-mom. I was 30 years old at the time when she found me and we quickly became friends. My life has been greatly enriched by meeting her and my brother and sister. It’s a story I love to tell, but I digress. Within a year she commissioned me to make a large hanging piece for her and her family’s home in Chicago. They had a large, very tall entry way and she asked me to make something cool to go in it. I wanted to make a more complicated kinetic work and ‘1x1x1=1’ was the result. It was a large moving atomic structure with concentric circles that was easy and fun to play with. Even a three-year-old could move it!

Since then I’ve used the circles-in-circles design for a number of different pieces and I’ve even motorized it (Transmutor). For the next ten years I continued making splash art and geometric kinetic art. The themes of these works revolved around Christian theology, social/personal commentary and astronomical elements.

In 2013 I began working with Lycra, a very stretchy material, and very strong magnets (3d Sketch Pad). I was inspired by a sculpture I saw in a hotel and I don’t know who the artist is, but I liked it a lot. These pieces are, to me, very much like splash art. Visually they are different, but intrinsically they are both ‘captured’ energy. The difference is that the Lycra pieces still have their potential energy, where as the splashes are solidified snapshots of energy.

I tried casting the Lycra pieces into bronze. It was some trial and error, and it took some wrestling with the casting process to get them to come out right. The Lycra is very thin and required special handling throughout the process, but the labor paid off (Stretch 1)!

In late 2013 and early in 2014 I was struck by an article I had seen in a fun space magazine. It said that when two neutron stars merge (NSM), or crash together, they form a black hole. During the explosion of the impact they send material into space that is so hot and full of energy that heavy materials are formed. Gold, platinum, and silver–among others–are examples of heavy materials and they require intense amounts of energy to make.

Ok, so here’s the thing, because of a sculpture I made called ‘Transmutor’, a playful homage to higher education (education makes gold out of base material), I had researched alchemy. 500 years ago, alchemists were trying to make gold out of lead and other base material. According to our understanding NSM’s are actually transmuting base materials into gold. Alchemy is actually done in far places of the universe! When I found this out I was strangely happy and really curious.

I began looking for all the information I could regarding these strange events. I checked out all the relevant materials the library had, and I watched all the YouTube videos that seemed on point, but eventually, I hit a wall. I wanted to know if there was more to know about these NSM’s. For some time I could not find any more information. Where is an Astrophysicist when you need one? I ended up sending an email to a NASA related website. To my surprise a Harvard professor contacted me. I will always be grateful for his answers to my questions! After contact from him I was ready to jump in and make the ‘Merge’ series, which I am still working on.

Presently, I am following the progress made at CERN in Switzerland. This is where the Large Hadron Super Collider is located, and they are smashing atoms together at extremely high speeds to uncover the mysteries still held by the atom. Astrophysics and Particle Physics continue to hold my interest, and I also continue to enter public art competitions. And I am always excited to do commission work.

To my kids: God has made you different than anyone else! Follow the path He has set before you with as much passion and joy as you can. I love you all!