I am an Artist and an Educator working primarily with glass for over 40 years. I received an MFA from Alfred University in 1991, and since 1996 I have run the Glass program at Hartwick College. My ideas, images, and content of my work are primarily informed by my experiences throughout my life and traveling, Student Abroad in the UK and Europe 1982, Student exchange to Taiwan in 1988, my many travels to China since 2000, and most importantly, my most constant Chinese influence, Jin Ju my wife. This can all be wrapped up together and is related to memory and the transient fleeting nature of the world.

It wasn’t until 2005, when I picked up my first digital camera, that photography gave me the language to express my awe of, and intimacy with nature. I marvel at Nature’s amazing tapestries, the fabric of our natural world that she weaves on her “lume” of light, with warps and wefts of richly diverse textures and forms, seduced by the lure of their ever-shifting contours and opacities. Initially, my images were mostly representational, then, gradually, I moved towards taking the viewer into Nature’s world of abstraction and directing attention to her impressionistic, and sometimes surreal, objets d’art.

Always fascinated with the interaction of light and glass, I embraced an opportunity to work with hot glass at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Passionately intrigued by the optics that emerge from works using this incredible medium, I began to photograph my glass pieces and then through them; a lens within a lens. My interest in the abstract grew.

I am drawn to Nature's organic forms juxtaposed against man-made simplicity, such as wood andmetal. Simple shapes and forms that attract color through reflection and interaction with nature inspire me. 

Growing up my grandmother used to put small cut flowers in delicate glass vases and bottles of various shapes and sizes on her window sill. I would admire how the glass supported the flower and how the flower's stem would reflect and refract in the vessel. I would gaze at the reflection of the colored glass throughout the room as the sun would hit it. The vessel's shapes and intricacies, my grandmother's delicate touch and time and dedication to growing the flower, and admiring her hard work and labor throughout the day as she gazed at it throughout the house.

When I inherited these vessels, I started to find various plants to put in them, and some plants developed small roots. Sprouts and dedication to new life and an opportunity to leave the vessel to take on stronger connections to the ground it was placed in inspired my connection to roots and the interactions that the roots, flowers, and plants had with the vessel and how the vessel nurtured the plants' development into something more. The clear and transparent glass allowed for a visual much more engaging than the vessel itself.