My roots are in rural Kentucky.  Always the creative child, I'd carve vessels to sail in Harrod's creek and build forts in the wooded valley behind the horse barn. I'd create fantastic stories and surround them with artifacts of my imagination.

This creativity followed me to the University of Kentucky where I searched through the various humanities programs looking for a spark to light my soul.  Creative writing, theater, lighting, and stage design I explored and cast to the side.  None held the power to capture my drifting soul.

 One day I discovered a large metal building down by the railroad tracks near university maintenance.  Inside, a group of dirty young students were beating, heating, welding and grinding away at various metal forms in the effort to chase down the creative muse. The courtyard behind was full of large brick kilns belching flames and smoke. Ahh! Fire and metal--I had found a home. 

 I spent several years studying Sculpture and Ceramic arts under the tutelage of my mentor, sculptor and professor Jack Gron. Inspired by the classic sculptors David Smith, Alexander Calder, and Alberto Giacometti, I explored my artistic expressions and earned a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture in 1996. Having achieved honors artistically and scholastically, I was offered and accepted a fellowship in the Florida State University Masters of Fine Art program.  There, I taught undergraduate classes in 3D design and sculpture.  I discovered a new passion for teaching, which would become a big part of my life.

I earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from FSU in 1998 and accepted an Associate Professor/ Teaching technician position at the Herron School of Art In Indianapolis Indiana that same year. While teaching 3Design, I met a student who was taking a glass blowing class at The Indianapolis Art Center and invited me to come check it out and play with some glass. The bug bit deep and drew blood! I had found my muse: GLASS! 

I continued teaching and developing my glass artistry through  furnace glass-blowing classes.  I began exploring how I could do glass for a living. Running a furnace and glory hole were much too expensive on my own and I just was not getting enough studio time at the Indianapolis Art Center. In 2000, I found the answer on a trip to Wisconsin where I met the marble maker Chuck Pound. He introduced me to lampworking, and the concept of working glass on a much smaller scale with a torch. When I returned home from this trip I bought my first torch (a Major Burner), and a small kiln, and began making beads and marbles on my own.

At the same time, the politics of a university career began to wear on me. In 2003, after long consideration and thorough discussion with my wonderful wife Amy, I decided to leave the university a pursue lampworking full-time. I have never looked back.

 In recent years, I have given up creating sets of beads for the jewelry industry and concentrated on "One of a Kind" Art glass Focal Beads. Influenced by aboriginal forms and designs juxtaposed with the graffiti images of the inner city, I find myself caught in a density of repetition--expressing it through scrolling patterns and script like designs of my "Urban Graffiti��" series.

In "The Garden" series I present my love of gardens and flowers. It has been a tradition in the men of my family to have large plots of zinnias in their vegetable gardens. I adhere to this tradition both in my gardens and my work. My expressions of sun forms and explosions of colorful florals are influenced by studies of Impressionism and Pop Art. I enjoy the fluidity and color of Van Gogh, the contrast of Peter Max,  and the softness of Seurat.  I attempt to capture some of their essence in my bead forms.

As I continue to grow as an artist I seek to find new directions in glass, and explore new ideas while pushing the old to higher realizations. I have recently moved back to the country to a rural farm and hope to bring more influences of the natural world to my palette.