I was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1941. My father was in the loan business, but his passion was woodworking. My mother was a primary school teacher with a passion for acting. My sister, also an artist, lives in Denver Colorado. When I was eight years old, the family moved to Milwaukee.
I studied theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the early 60’s. In my Junior year I dated a student of dance, who introduced me to the work of Merce Cunningham, then in his prime, and John Cage. Their impact on me was profound. After receiving a BA in theater I decided on a career in visual art and enrolled at UW-Milwaukee where I studied under mentors John Colt and Lawrence Rathsack. In 1967 I received an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois-Urbana
At the University of Illinois I met and married Barbara Apel, a fellow graduate student and printmaker. We moved to Boston where I took a teaching position at the Art Institute of Boston (now Lesley University College of Art and Design). Barbara and I rented a storefront studio in Jamaica Plain and I started doing figure sculpture, something for which I had no training because the figure was not then systematically taught in art schools.
Barbara and I divorced in 1972. I took a year off from teaching and moved to Paris (1975-76) where I studied French at the Sorbonne and wrote an art column for the Paris Metro. I met a French woman, Brigitte Boidot, who followed me to Boston, where we were married in 1977. We had a son, Julien. The marriage was dissolved in 1981. During this period I added photography to my list of skills, a step toward the interdisciplinary form my work would eventually take. My photographs were acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, Danforth Museum of Art, and the Boston Athenaeum.
The 1980’s were a period of intense activity and my work synthesized several mediums: photography, performance art, copier art and artists books. I was involved in several collaborative projects: The Theater of Kinetic Sculpture (World Sculpture Racing), The Metropolitan Artists and Poets (MAAPS), and The Arts Collaborative, Inc. Major support came from the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Milwaukee Performing Arts Center, and the Fitchburg Art Museum. The decade was also a one of intense spiritual activity as I moved from evangelical Christianity to Yoga and Zen Buddhism. After a trip to Japan in 1997 I became a student of Daien Hifu, a Rinzai Zen priest and founder of the Wild Goose Zendo in Concord Massachusetts. From 1986 to 2013 I was married to Elizabeth Rotter, a graphic designer, and we had a son, Nikolaus
In 2005 I retired from Lesley University College of Art and Design, where I taught Advanced Sculpture, Interdisciplinary Studio and Art of the Western World for 47 years. My oldest son is now an animator living in Brooklyn. Nikolaus, my younger son, is a film studies graduate from Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts, currently exploring digital media and living in Great Barrington.
Elizabeth and I divorced in 2016. Single again, I currently live and work in Lowell, Massachusetts. My recent work is Interdisciplinary–integrating sculpture, photography, performance and video– with a focus on personal narratives that spring from a spiritual core and are layered on a broad array of mythic and psychological archetypes.