Influences and Approach
All of my work strives to find a balance between the glories of nature and my particular aesthetic sensibilities, as highly-inflected as they are by the baroque, my training as a zen buddhist monastic, a lifetime of collecting, and a probably entirely anachronistic pursuit of imperfect beauty.
I’ve been particularly influenced by the neolithic and its incomprehensible productions; the calligraphy and painting from the Muromachi through the Edo periods in Japan; the poetry of the Tang dynasty in China, that later of Basho, Ryokan, and Ikkyu in Japan, and even later that of Jim Harrison and Ada Limón in the US; the pre-cruciform churches of Anglo-Saxon England; the interior excesses of the late Renaissance and immediately afterwards; the shadows of Junichirō Tanizaki and Caravaggio; the transcendence of Bach, Mozart, Satie, and Chopin (and more than a little Wagner); the polychromic wordshards of Borges, and an ever-expanding ecology of extraordinarily creative and inspired ceramicists, musicians, architects, sculptors, painters, poets, and writers that make the contemporary such an interesting and exciting place within which to live.
I work largely from some alchemic stew of memory, intuition, wild-eyed experimentation, and the knowledge that whatever happens, it will all be all right. We’re all going the same place, detours are interesting, but not defining.
After years elsewhere, I now live in very rural France, where the insanity is of a particularly tangy Gallic sort, one that I’ve discovered I much prefer over much other.