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I love sculpture. Sculpture insists that we be in its presence, face to face, to truly understand and experience it.

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And so, what is more powerful than looking at someone face to face?

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While I am best known as an abstract sculptor, crafting intricate, intense, visceral and colorful sculptures, I have recently been creating mask-like faces to be hung on the wall in relief, as well as integrating heads into my more three-dimensional sculpture. Originally the intellectual scaffolding for this project was to re-imagine the political villains of our time as grotesques and demons, much as Phillip Guston drew Richard Nixon in Poor Richard. I soon became entranced by both the formal possibilities and emotional power of facial structure. Despite distortion, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth create a form that is universally recognizable. In process other influences took root: toothy Romanesque gargoyles, the hellish gods of Himalayan cloth paintings, the Rat Fink comics of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, and James Ensor’s masked revelers confronting death.

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The creation of these mask-like wall reliefs has now become a large part of my studio practice, augmenting the “exquisite turbulence” (to borrow from Ensor) of my already baroque sculpture. I seek to craft work that is intricate and vivid, that exposes and obscures emotion at the very same time.