"How do artists become artist?" I've heard the question many times. Who are artists? As a profession, the artist typically offer little security and continual pursuit of things that don’t yet exist. I am now 68 years old, and art to me is a profession, yes, and a way of life.

My daddy was a surgeon and research scientist. I was young and he flew us to San Francisco. After long silence, he spoke from the pilot's chair, "The only thing I ’d rather be doing is artwork." Artwork? He's a doctor. My dear ol’ mum made the most charming artwork since the earliest days of my life, and of course before. She's still does now at age 86. Her motto about art and other things is “always do the best you can with material at hand”. Seeds planted—leading to my pursuits in the arts and the intrinsically rewarding life since led.

I was born in Miami on a trip to South America and have traveled since birth. When my parents returned from South America, we moved so often that I never attended the same school two years in a row until college. My work has continued to satisfy a wanderlust bred into my Irish/Apache bones.

After returning from Air Force duty in Japan, undergraduate studies ended with Bachelor degrees in Sociology and Rhetorical Theory. Work in related fields followed, for a few years, and I found it sad. I went back to school. Art. Long Beach State College in the late sixties and early seventies.

I met a fellow doing stained glass. He liked my designs. I traded design work for craft lessons. At the time, I had a partnership with others and we ran Victoria Beach Salon Inc. in Laguna Beach: an art gallery, antique emporium, and landscape design firm. We soon added art glass to the list. The partnership eventually dissolved. I continued receiving art glass commission by referral.

In 1996 I returned to school to learn more about digital tools. That first semester I met Christian Karl Janssen. Christian was the star student in that first class and subsequent classes. He became immediately interested in my work. Soon thereafter he fixed my Macintosh fax modem, served a formal apprenticeship, and learned what I had to teach about art, fabrication, and collaboration with clients, architects, designers, artists, and crafts persons. He seemed to have been born with a computer in one hand and soon became indispensable to my studio. Christian is now my business partner and chief collaborator. His work has matured over the subsequent years. He is an artist. He has his own. Now, other american and international artists commission his talents within their art projects.

Artists often abandon ideas because of feasiblity. Christian has an intuitive sense of how to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. Further, his skills in understanding highly complex conceptions tied with an infallible sense of composition make him not simply an asset, but often the difference between a dream and a manifested work. The first project we engaged as a team was The Veil. An epiphany gained from the Request for Proposal (RFP) I dismissed as undoable in terms of the time and labor it would have taken to fabricate—Christian had his own epiphany on how it could be accomplished. After many ends, that was the beginning. Subsequent commissions demonstrate a sustained capacity for manifesting unprecedented work.

BREATHE project site visit. May, 2009.

Light, the medium with which I work, is universally understood. Through glass, light is captured, reflected, refracted and projected. Glass allows the environment itself to be transmitted to the viewer.

This interaction is vital to my art as it becomes a collaboration of all that is within my physical, social and spiritual being. The special challenge of working with glass on an architectural scale fascinates me. My current experiments involve light moving through multiple sheets of double etched glass and mirror. I design in the multiple dimensions; my work has sculptural considerations.

The perceived kinetic behavior of light passing through multiple panels of carved glass is conducive to manipulating the fourth dimension of time and space. The nature of the medium can help the viewer experience different spheres or states of mental association. This is because psychic or meditative states are activated by sensory stimuli. Using optical anomalies, I can imply gentle kinetic-life effects. The result is a dynamic art form, giving rise to secondary patterning of light and shadow. This change, while activating a sensory pleasure, will ultimately trigger an emotional reaction or state of mind.

We were all so young, still so alive with childhood, yet in bodies of men and women. Long shadows and street lamps paved the way as our group of writers and painters set out to see the screening of "Five Easy Pieces." That evening we left early. The young lead, Jack Nicholson, was to attend the showing. Before the movie we stopped streetside at Café Flor in San Germain de Pres to meet other friends.

Aromas of fresh coffee and the Seine filled the air. As we approached the café, a friend saw a familiar face and we went to greet her. His friend invited us to join her. It was here over coffee that he introduced me to Paloma Picasso. Her accent complimented perfect English. She was charming. We talked. We laughed. Jack Nicholson and others mingled. The screening was a great success. During the next two weeks, Paloma showed me Paris. These warm August days passed quickly; oddly, this time was eternal.

Many Parisians made their annual pilgrimage to the Medi, so the city seemed pleasantly deserted. We spent much time in parks, speaking plainly, enjoying the richness of naiveté. Often on benches Paloma scissored silhouettes from bits of patterned wallpaper and applied them in collage, a nuance to an old Parisian artistic pastime of cutting out silhouettes of tourists. One afternoon we went to the flat of her mother, Francois Gilot. Paloma showed many works her mother painted. They were beautiful, strikingly like the paintings of Picasso.

The two weeks passed. I ventured to Geneva, then on. Paloma and I lost touch. From a distance she was ever present, floating through the media and my memories of Paris, 1970.