| What are your earliest memories related to art? | |
| Watching my mother paint. | |
| How and when did you start becoming an artist yourself? | |
| I started building wood and plastic models in grade school, and after a while I started making my own constructions out of spare and salvaged parts. I started painting in high school because my mother painted and I wanted to try it. I started by copying famous works , then moved on to painting from photographs. | |
| What was the evolution like toward finding your current voice and visual vocabulary? | |
| I started getting some notice and rewards for my work, so I went to college to get a BFA. There I was exposed to many new ways to think about art. I was a painter all through undergrad and then grad school, but after I graduated I started to make things from found objects. That led me to using scrap glass as a material. As I became more skillful with glass as a primary medium I started to use it more and more. | |
| What is your process like? | |
| It depends on what I am making. For leaded glass panels I like to improvise the design as I go along. I am not interested in making traditional leaded panels. For chandeliers I like to use found objects I already have available, but if client has something in mind I try to work with them to come up with something unique. Sometimes I will use glass from beer bottles and make them into utilitarian objects such as bowls and platters. Other times I start with a specific plan drawn out on paper to use as a pattern. | |
| Is there anything from your artist statement that you wish to expound on, that you normally don’t have the chance to discuss? | |
| I like flawed surfaces. So much of the art I see in homes is glossy and slick, with clean lines. I like things to be a little messy, and I try to use flaws to set off the overall beauty of a piece. | |
| What do you try to control in your surfaces, and what do you leave to chance? | |
| In my fused glass work I want a smooth surface, but the edges can be more accidental. When I make a bowl from scrap glass I like to heat the glass enough to be able to stir it around and mix the colors. | |
| Where do you see your work going from here? | |
| I want to continue to learn new techniques to use with glass that I can then incorporate into my work. | |
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