I love sculpting figures, and the human figure most of all, for the experience is strangely godlike and existential: from clay (rather than "the dust of the earth") I shape a being housed in torso, limbs, and a head, like myself, yet wholly new and unknown, and only alive now, in my act of shaping. Likewise, I love sculpting a portrait, for then I am able to read a life, and not just the one life of this individual who sits before me, but the lives of his or her ancestors; I read a history, and ask myself questions: Where did these high cheekbones come from, the aquiline arch of this nose?

I started out creating little people out of clay, curious, odd, lonely beings with distorted limbs and only rudimentary faces, some fifteen years ago, as I was going through a divorce, and painful separation from my son. Those little people embodied my hurts, and caused me to smile. Spurred by the kinship I felt for them, I refined my methods, and bought a professional's tools, and labored to render their descendents with ever greater accuracy and detail, filling their faces with as much expression as I could muster.

My brother, Stefan, who with his wife Kay had by that time built a substantial collection of art, took a shine to some of my figures, and Stefan paid to have Steven Strumlauf, of Charlottesville, VA, cast a couple in bronze: First Steps, and later, Pascal. Later, Stefan commissioned me to create a _ lifesize garden sculpture, which became Rapture. This was an exciting opportunity, and I worked hard to create a figure who was lively right down to his fingertips.

Jazzed by the experience of that piece, I tacked toward other large bronze works: Storyteller, who rises from the pages of an open book with wide-spread hands and vivid face like the climax of a great narrative; and Calling the Powers. In this half-lifesize work, one sees a woman--a great spirit and elder of the tribe--clad in a long-skirted cassock, after she has painfully ascended a windy ridge, and fallen to her knees, where with arms flung wide to the bristling clouds, she Calls the Powers. I was thoroughly spent at the completion of this piece, psychically drained. No joke!

In the fall of 2002, I attended the Masters Series Workshop at the Richard MacDonald Studio in Monterey, California, and in Richard I saw a sculptor who has brought figurative sculpture to the level of fluency I hope to achieve, and since that time, I have sought to maintain a discipline of regular practice, and emulate the qualities I saw in him: speed, accuracy, concentration, and imagination. As a displaced academic, I like the research, too: the daily study of human anatomy, in all its marvelous and supple complexity. Indeed, figurative sculpture is a ceaseless study and questioning. And yet once in the studio, all such beetle-browed investigation must cease, transforming into deft fluency. An absorbed sculptor works, I think, in a manner which is baffling to a novice, not moving methodically from place to place on the figure, but seemingly dancing all over, clay going on almost simultaneously in several places so that the figure seems to emerge altogether as a single being. May I learn his fluency!

Yet figurative sculpture is more than realism and accurate rendering; it is about Form. This is a new language for me, who was raised with books. It is a wordless language, yet as universal as music, and involves the syllables of artful placement, emphasis and direction, proportion and volume, and light. Ah, light! Jean Antoine Houdon, the Master, knew that for all the weight and mass of bronze or marble, it was the use of light which gave sculpture enduring substance. May I learn the secrets of his art!