I find the world a beautiful place with pattern and texture and collusions of color all around and I want to recreate that beauty for others to appreciate through my work. I have been working on frit blends and how to use them in subtle transitions for a couple of years. Having always loved the work of the French painter Monet, I see many opportunities using frit to fulfill his urging to see the world thru little daubs of pure color. I am fascinated by how an Impressionistic painting can be so lively, seeming on fire. My study concerns taking vibrant base colors and cross mixing in frit form to develop many hundreds of frit blends. Each work develops its own palate, as it is necessary to have a vast range of shades and tints to produce the subtle variations of hues in the work.
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I attended several art schools in California, directly out of high school, starting in 1968. I married my high-school sweetheart, Colleen, in 1971 and we started our family immediately. Work took precedence over art however by 1975 I started our own cabinet shop, in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Moved to Forest Grove, Oregon in 1981 where we again established our cabinet shop, Pacific Design Inc, which has grown and prospered and become one of the most established shops in the Portland, Oregon area. We sold Pacific Design to our son Chris and long time shop foreman Ron in Sept of 2016. Colleen and I both retired and in the winter of 2017 moved to our fabulous lodge style home on the rim of the canyon of Deschtes River, outside of Redmond Oregon
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Introduced to glass work in 2001, I was fascinated by the seemingly magical qualities of the material.
I took several basic glass working classes from Bullseye Glass in Portland and after 4 classes I was hooked. I began creating my own blends of colored frit in 2004 and as of this writing, January 2009, have over 450 blends. (UPDATE. early 2017, the count is up to over 1700 something and I now have custom blend sheet stock) I began experimenting with Impressionistic type frit paintings in 2004 with Sailboats on the River and Farm Scene. I recognize that while I liked the direction my vision was taking me, I would need a vastly expanded palette. It took months to create several hundred blends which I used in a few practice pieces. I took a couple of years off from glass but then resumed studio work in the winter of 2007. Deciding to enter Bullseye Glass' emerge contest for aspiring artists I created "Pear Study", "Banana Study", "Pepper Still Life" and "Sunrise Landscape" over the course of a few months. At last I could see that I was headed in the direction that my vision was taking me. "Pear Study" was selected to be a finalist among 20 other pieces from the U.S. and was exhibited in Bullseye Glass gallery for several months. This is great encouragement to continue to develop other works that share my vision that glass is a medium for artwork and not the focus of attention itself.
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