Much of this Older Work seen here is from the 1980’s and 1990’s. During this time, I honed my craft and learned how to “draw with wood”.  Prior to discovering wood sculpture, I had painted with oil paints exclusively. But one very hot August day, my studio walls were completely filled with multiple large-scale paintings that just wouldn’t dry due to the humidity of that particular summer’s record heat wave.  Rather than forgo creating art for the day due to the lack of wall space, I spontaneosuly picked up a piece of balsa wood and a straight edged razor from my drafting table and instinctively began to carve.  Literally eight hours passed without any distraction. I was totally in the groove of this new art form, resulting in an epiphany: sculpture was speaking to my soul more than painting. From that point on, my work progressed from mere whittling and creating human forms in balsa wood to carving all sorts of spirals, shapes and figures from much larger branches and sticks I gathered on walks in Central Park in New York City.  But I still felt restless because I was trying too hard to invent the forms that I was sculpting instead of letting the wood dictate the form in its natural state. But I welcome this early period of my career, for it helped crystalize my vision for my work, which is to transcend creating shapes that are purely linear in nature and instead translating non-wood objects into three-dimensional wooden sculptures by synthesizing the natural shapes that already exist in the wood into a new found object.