What Shapes the Sculptor?
Almost every time I attend an event, someone asks me how I became a sculptor and how I get my ideas, so here's my attempt at answering.

Sculpture occupies the public square—and the private self.  Done right, sculpture offers a vital spark of new meaning for anyone passing by who pauses to allow a connection.  But what gives the sculpture meaning?  Who originates the vital spark? 
As one who made my life shaping sculpture, I often wonder which parts of me make up what I make.  All of my sculpture comes from all of my self.  I occupy the time and space called Right Now.  I cannot do otherwise.  So, when I make the ten-thousand decisions which create a sculpture, they undeniably come from me and all that I have felt and failed and learned over the decades.  I think I started this process young.

Going to Hell
I grew up in a religion-based community. Though I had my own religion, it was not accepted by my young friends who announced that their mothers told them I was going to hell—whatever “hell” was for a six-year old boy.  I asked why, and was told it was because I didn’t go to church.  I told them I did go to church, but that didn’t matter, I didn’t go to their church and therefore I was the other—alone, while a neighborhood full of children my age played together. 
It hurt and I didn’t have the social tools to either understand or stand up to being the Other.  Growing older did not help much.  Junior high was a nightmare.  I found some friends who were also Other and together we fumbled and found ways to deal with the hurt.  We dealt, but I know it shaped me in all my life’s relations.  I dove into science and engineering with their safe, predictable outcomes governed by formulas and equations, not personalities or prejudice. 
I don’t write this in search of sympathy.  Many others suffered worse.  I write because after all these decades I see the effect of these lessons on me and my sculpture.  In fact, now I am grateful to have walked through that fire.  Here’s why.

Fire Benefits
In making my sculptures, I don’t seek nor expect the approval of others.  Some will like me and my work and some will not.  .  . and for sometimes unfathomable reasons.  I’m OK with that.  This quality frees me up to follow my own music and not look to see if the parade galleries are full.  Also, “good” is when I say, “Good,” not when someone else decides.  For any kind of artist, following one’s own spirit requires the ability to ignore the ghosts.  The fire blessed me with that ability.
Diving deeper into my subconscious, my sculptures for the last dozen or so years have no “insides.”  They stress gesture with the least possible volume.   In photos, my sculptures appear mostly complete, but up close you see I represent the volumes, the insides, only by their bounding shapes—the gesture markers—the sinewy essence of flowing movement.  This concept pulls on all of me as I sculpt.  Why?
Looking inside me deeper still, I believe this style, unique to me, comes from being uncomfortable depicting what lies inside someone else.  What I can see, I understand.  People’s “inside” matters would confuse and sometimes disappoint me in ways where I was extra-sensitive.  I feel uncomfortable with what I cannot see or understand.

The Joy is in the Gesture
Not so with gesture.  Gesture, especially in dance, communicates pure emotion—our best offering, pure beauty, grace, motion, joy.  So I decided.  Sculpt gesture, not insides.  I delight in the beauty, grace and purity of gesture.  As a bonus, the implied “inside” forms create complex and sweeping shadows, tracing the gesture once again.  As I create more and more gesture sculptures—I call them Swoopies—their force on me snowballs, convincing me I’m on the right track.  The right track for me, anyway. 

Another deep question remains: Why do I ache to create sculpture?  Why spend every uncommitted moment in the struggle for “better still?”  
OK. Here goes.  Three things: The challenge, Exploiting me and Legacy.

• The challenge.   I never faced a harder job description:  I must create meaning using no words, only forms.  You see, the what of things is the domain of physics.  I have that in my back pocket.  But nothing in my world of equations and engineering points toward the meaning of things.  The meaning of things is the domain of the spirit—a spirit, I confess, I had sidelined for many years.  Finding a wordless meaning and crafting it into sculpture with my hands makes me new.  I connect with a world that once betrayed me and now we can be one again.
  
• Exploiting me.  I have a deep background in design, publishing, management, teaching and making.  Not bragging, I just do.  Sculpture uses all of me.  Every talent I possess goes into one aspect or another of creating a sculpture.  No other application exploits me better.  No other challenge is so exciting or rewarding.
  
• Legacy:  I want to leave joy behind.  My greatest goal involves someone, somewhere, sometime after-my-time, viewing a sculpture of mine and saying, “He thought the world was a beautiful place.”
  

I think that covers the big questions.  The little questions (remember the ten-thousand decisions) remain in the realm of whimsy, peeves, trifles and druthers, too small to tease out their foundations.  Perhaps some professional analysis would help, but I haven’t the time.  
I’m too busy chasing the dream. Embrace your own dreams, and stay healthy.

I sculpt.  
​
While that may seem like total creative license, there is a Book of Iron-clad Requirements, built over centuries, looming over every sculptor.  Just look at any art museum (from a social distance, mind you, they’re all online for tours these days--try it yourself).  As you look, ask:
​Were rich old men in waistcoats really that interesting to artists?
Where did the school of socialist realism find all those happy workers?  Why are children always depicted with only their mothers or alone.  What were the fathers doing?

​In my virtual visits to the worlds' art galleries I have discovered happy news!  Time ripped entire chapters from the BIR.  


Think about this:

No longer requirements (now, at least)

• Must please royalty
• Must please oligarchs
• Must make propaganda
• Must be academically accepted
• Must cloak whatever you make in religious or moralist legend (were biblical characters really   mostly naked?)

These requirements, I feel, went away when we lost our respect for institutions, respect which was lost when we were betrayed by their outrageous crimes and corruption.  (Just a fact, no time for outrage.  See Twitter or Facebook for that.) 

So where does that leave me.  I no longer need to please people I do not care for.  But there are still whole BIR chapters which still apply.
I promise to concentrate on pleasing YOU. To this end, I will follow what remains of the BIR.  
I will do art, not technique. Art education seems to teach how, and only rarely, why.  Art is in the why. The questions count.
I will be “of my time.”  Tougher than it looks.  Ask, “What is MY time?”  Hint: Don’t look back.
I will ask sculptural questions about engaging, important things.  While Art is in the questions.  The answers are in you.
I will be unique.  No derivative sculpture.  If somebody, anywhere, did it, it’s been done.  I will do the totally new or pack it in.

Perhaps this is a bigger load for me than before.  I can no longer seek the hint of a smile from My Master as a signal to affix my signature and quit.  There is no longer a filter between me and transcendence.  If I fail, there is no Great Influencer to bail me out.


Trust me, this load is plenty, and I am daunted, but YOU TOO have a new freedom and a new load.
The BIR’s gone.  Nobody sets rules for you to like, or not like, particular sculpture anymore. 
You are free to love or not love, understand or walk away, be inspired or disgusted, all with no ghosts on your shoulder to point at what you must like or reject.
You stand free to find your heart, and to step ahead of yourself in the soft hands of beauty.  And that is what it feels like.  You step ahead of yourself. It sounds corny, but I see this miracle all the time.  I’ve been you, standing speechless before an unexplainable message.  

In the song “Rainbow Connection,” Kermit the Frog said it best, “It’s something that I’m supposed to be.” It sits there, but it's inside me, inside my head, inside my soul, sometimes with tears.  

Go find your something.  If you find it in my sculpture, I am thrilled.  If  you find it somewhere else, I’m thrilled.

So give yourself permission to completely engage with sculpture you like.  Hear its message.  Feel its texture.  Listen for the echo in your heart.  It’s alright.  The BIR doesn’t apply to you today.  
Maybe it never did.

Embrace your circles, and stay healthy.
Write if you see beauty​,
Harold

​The inside of my sculpture creates the outside .  .  . and the outside creates the inside.  I never knew how this enigma would play out in my life. 
 
I sit cocooned from our world turning upside down, working in my sculpting bubble.  Outside lie the breathless hour-to hour-reports of the just-revealed diagnosis, the somber escalating statistics, the terrifying unknowns.  Things will be different, but how?  Friends will be sick--possibly dead--but who?  Institutions will fail, but which?  
 
I spent the last six weeks quietly sanding my newest four creations in my new studio: a solitary pursuit that feels almost meditative.  Sand the inside, sand the outside.  Recoat, repeat.  I get to intimately know each curve and move…many times.  
 
I keep thinking about inside and outside.
 
This inside/outside enigma draws my sculpture’s witness closer.  
 
This same enigma draws our world closer.  We marvel at all the ties that bind us to those-we-do-not-know, in worlds we cannot fathom, speaking a language we do not understand.  We are all connected in ways we do not completely understand.  We live in an interdependent global community in a country with a fiercely individual nature. Yet, what one of us now has the capacity to go it alone?  
 
Social distance makes us alone, our common needs unite us.  Inside and outside.
 
Sculptors point us to new ways of thinking. It’s in the job description.  My sculpture (I say ‘my’ because no one else makes inside/outside Swoopies) tells the story of how inside becomes outside, of how we continually reconcile our two worlds, of how what lies inside us can affect the world, of how all the curves eventually become circles.
 
We found new heroes and heroines in our medical workers. We will never undervalue our teachers, our grocers, our farmers, our truckers, our delivery people .  .  . or for that matter, anyone again.  They are outside us and inside us and we in them (even if only virtually).  
 
Embrace your circles, and stay healthy.

Mom Joy  
​                                                                    
I recently attended a dance recital of my beautiful granddaughter Elizabeth. She danced like an angel (as only an 11-year-old can).
One of the recital dances consisted of only preschoolers; four little girls dancing to a bouncy tune, I forget which one.  Anyone who’s seen a dance recital knows how hard the kids work to get their movements together. Still, one four-year-old girl stood out.  Not because she had her dance together but because she embodied pure joy. 
I am in the joy business (sculpture is just a vehicle).  So, I watch this little girl joy bundle closely.  She knew she had to dance with the others to make the teacher happy but, oh my. Her Mom was in the audience!  Nothing was more exciting and more wonderful than having Mom in the audience!  So, a couple of times, as the dancers moved about, she would break stride to wave at Mom.  And then, there were two hands waving.  And then she threw a kiss.  And then a two-handed kiss.
At that point, she looked around to see what the others were doing and got a bit confused, so she ran to the front of the stage waving to her Mom. Fearful that she would go right over the front of the stage the teacher bolted from the behind the curtain to catch her and usher her back to the others.  But still, there was nothing more exciting then Mom in the audience. Following the curtain-bow, she broke from the herd and raced down to the first row to hug Mom and thrill everyone else.
Mom was flustered, the instructor was flustered, the audience was howling with delight while the purest bond of joy flowed like electricity between Mom and her loving young daughter.
Poets, musicians, choirs and, yes, sculptors labor daily to show us what joy is all about; but it took four-year-old to let me see pure joy.
I don’t think I could be that joyful. 
I wish I could.  I want to try. 
Maybe I can approach joy as a four-year-old girl, full of love, energy and delight and lose the gray areas and compromises that weigh down life.
May your life be full of joy.

I am sitting here in Oregon watching the gold and red leaves gently falling from the maple trees in the back yard.  Under the trees and under blue tarps sit my tools for the physical creation of the spiritual creation that is sculpture.  

While the physical creation has slowed, waiting on some architectural remedies, the spiritual creation never stopped.  Soon they will blend, but I am sure the blend will be novel.  I expect things will be the same, just  in a different location. That keeps me sane.  But I know I have changed right down to my molecules.  

Through miraculous happenstance, I have met my most admired figurative realism sculptor, a production designer dripping with accolades from broadway plays to Disneyworld, Crimson Rose the once-naked fire lady of Burning man, and a dozen other creatives who, without giving me direction changed me--forever.  My daughter has a t-shirt reading "Don't look back.  It's not where you're going."
​
The chaos that once was my studio will soon give birth to new sculpture, a reborn studio and new opportunities for beauty. I didn't give serious thought to sculpture lighting possibilities, to mediums expressing their true emotional and implicit messages, or to the effects of elemental spirals on joyful creations.  Can I go back?  Nah.  When the world is swirling around me, I tell myself nothing has changed.  Makes me comfortable.  But nah.

It's been a while since I've written.  Life has intervened with all of its textures.  The season has changed from an an extended cool Spring to Summer bursting with warm days and the occasional thunderstorm to cool us down. 

My work has been consuming.  There have been some wonderful highs and some wrenching lows...marvelous successes followed by a pile of rubble on floor.  These opposites are not bad or good--they just are.  I give neither the positive or the negative any play.  They are opportunities to learn the lessons of the present moment so that I don't have to learn them in a future time.  I've been grateful for each of them. For instance--

Connection. I've had the good fortune to have personal connections grow into public placements.  My community of patrons and friends have opened doors and pocketbooks to make a place for my sculpture in their communities and homes.
 
Persistence.  Piles of tangled filament have led to careful analysis of root causes and marked improvements in technique and tools.  I had one piece I reworked countless times...and as I did, I discovered better, simpler, more elegant ways to complete an astonishingly beautiful new piece.
Patience.  I admit that I want to get things done right now. In practicing patience, I've learned that all things happen in their own time, on their own schedule...and they happen exactly when they are supposed to in exactly the right place.  
​
Not Doing.  I look at the river of life as it floats by and I ask myself if there is something I should or could contribute to make the moment better, or if it's even mine to do at all.  In not doing, I've become more attuned to what I can do, if anything.  And many times, the answer is nothing. 
As we move toward fall, I constantly practice gratitude. And as I do, I am given grace to continue on my path.
​​

As a sculptor, one of the greatest pleasures I have is watching how viewers interact with my sculptures.  Once, a decade ago, I had a woman look at one of my rough-textured small bronzes and burst into sobs.  When she finally recomposed herself, she told me, “That sculpture is me when I was young. We had nothing and my mother did her best, but I always had messy hair and was a little disheveled…but I was happy anyway, especially when I danced.”


Recently I’ve noticed something different.  Lots of people want to go dancing with my sculptures.  I mean LOTS of folks.  In every group there seems to be at least one person that starts dancing.  My favorite is little girls.  So why do people want to dance with them?  Maybe it's the same reason when Garth Brooks sings, I think I can sing.
The sculptures are light on their feet and look to be floating.  .  .maybe that person sees their self taking flight in dance.  Perhaps they are inspired by the movement and want to see for themselves, just for a moment, if they really have a hidden dancer lurking inside. Maybe they really are a dancer—jumping toddler, lithe grownup, or arm-chair ballerina—and they want to see if they have really got, or still have, that playful move.  
​
Last week in Sioux Falls for an installation, I met a real ballerina, Chloe, who, goaded by her friends, showed her moves next to Spiral Dance.  ​

Sometimes I wonder if anybody really sees or understands what I am trying to do with joyful dances.  Last week, sitting on a park bench away from my sculpture, I was handed dozens of little dancing love letters from ordinary people of all ages who shed their ought tos and must dos for a moment of joy in the sun.  Every dance filled my cup.  It just doesn’t get any better than that.

When I last posted, I was deep into curating the flotsam my life and three or four former generations of my family.  The 40 boxes have been reduced to eight; pictures have been sent to be scanned (7,800 of 'em); and many questions about my forbears were answered.  Those of you chuckling now know that each answer creates eight questions.  

The oldest letter was from 1775. The sweetest find was four 78 rpm recordings of my grandmother (known as the Oklahoma Nightingale) singing from her barnstorming career as headliner for the silent movie circuit.  And then there were friends and family for whom the only physical remainder was in my hands.

Upon reentering my sculpture world, I carried forward curating.  Some of my sculpture experiments and intentions were great.  Others produced only the detritus of lost dreams, useless tools, aging materials and sincere written plans for great accomplishment.  Out they went, perhaps saving a memory token to puzzle whomever curates my leftovers.

I'm an experimenter and an innovator with both ideas and materials.  I started out in oil clay, then Terra Cotta (water clay), moved on to traditional lost-wax bronzes, experimented with plaster, researched ferro-cement, taught myself welding to create Flourishes, laid up fiberglass, learned to create new Swoopieprototypes with 3D technology, and most recently, moved to larger-than-life carbon fiber Swoopiesculptures.

My studio space reflected this meandering path through a whole forest of materials and techniques.  Eight large bookcases were crammed with anatomy, art, photography and painting reference materials. Boxes of wax dancer macquettes were nuzzled in along early bronzes of (can you imagine?) cowgirls. Steel pipe was leaning against prototype 3D prints.   My 3D printers sat among my hot wax tools.  You get the idea.  Picture every piece of clothing you ever wore draped somewhere in your studio.

Now, I've not read the book or seen the Marie Kondo series on The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  But one of those nearest and dearest to me (whose name shall remain--Deborah) suggested that I look at my melange of art paraphernalia with an eye to what gives me joy now.   

Not yesterday, not tomorrow.  Today.  Right now. 

So began the purge.  Fellow artists kindly relieved me of many of my reference materials.  Our high school art department was delighted to take the 2-D materials for its students. My fellow model railroaders are now enjoying all of those kits and scenery acquired for a bygone dream.  Duplicate power tools found a new home with those who need them to build habitat.  

It felt like I was giving away big parts of my life, but the parts were acquired for chasing a dream and--well, dreams change.  The rear-view mirror doesn't indicate where I'm going.  And I enjoy having uncluttered space.  It seems like every great leap forward in my life has started with a clean desk, and now it is real clean.  So look out.  Ideas are flowing faster than I can imagine their creation.  I am moving into major joy.  

Watch this space.  

As patriarch, I find myself the curator of my family history--all fifty boxes of the flotsam and jetsam that comprise my life (to now) and all my forbears. Each year, I set aside those mementos--cards, letters, faded pictures, report cards, hand drawn pictures, break-up letters--from 20 branches of the famtree.  I promised myself over years that I'd go through them sometime.  And now is sometime.

My eyes well up with tears of gratitude for the people who have loved me and mine, with tears of regret for the might-have-been or didn't do and tears of sorrow for the family and friends no longer there to share our lives and loves.  I've laughed at the funny letters, smiled at the joyful pictures and had glorious fun recounting the best embarrassing stories to my kids and grandkids.  Like a time machine, I can go back to my old (young) self and feel the anxiety of big-consequence decisions--some made with excruciating deliberation, some by random chance.

I came across a photo of my first sculpture show in Encampment, Wyoming.  I was unreasonably proud of making it to a "real" show with other "real" artists.  My work was raw--extremely elongated bronze and clay figures. Some were scary.  My booth was even more so--replete with white plastic shelves, beaded curtains and shiny stones.  What did I know anyway?  I am forever grateful to my across-the-aisle neighbor who kindly shared with me his elegant pedestal designs, which I use to this day.  

I remember a trip to Normandy, France, visiting the American Cemetery and being stunned walking among the grave markers to see that every row, rank and echelon pointed directly to me wherever I stood.  They all seemed to radiate--to me.  

I got that same feeling poring over my fragmented history.  Every knowledge, ability, experience, failure, love and pain has found its way into my sculpture today.  And I never saw it that way until now. ​

​I cannot stand still in my sculpture. My mind is constantly in "tinker" mode--what about thatmaterial? thatpose? thatnew idea? What else is possible?  How can I push the boundary just a little further?

My studio reflects this incessant quest for the next interesting thing.  It looks a bit like a laboratory experiment (or ten!) in progress. Boxes of materials from all over the world.  Resins of every imaginable combination. A tool for every occasion.  Dust, fiber, paint.  .  .paper on the floor to catch the over flow.  Piles of sculpture parts that didn't quite come out.  A birds nest of filament spilling out from a printer job run amok.  

Pre-emergent Bird's Nest sculpture

I have a love/antipathy relationship with my 3-D printers, which, at the moment, are behaving like recalcitrant toddlers--spewing parts, fiber, and glass build-plates to the floor as they have the mechanical equivalent of a temper tantrum.  Still, I relish the flexibility of beginning with a rough 3D print and carbon-fiber layup for the finished sculpture.  A new-to-the-world combination that brings incredible new Swoopie sculptures that are strong and light weight at the same time--sculptures you simply can't make with conventional techniques


Most of you normal people would look at the mess and say, now that's a failure!  Instead, I see it as a success in progress.  Every one of my leaps forward has been just as messy, just as confusing, just as perplexing. So I keep tweaking, fiddling, conducting my post-mortems and reloading, because I know that soon.  .  .really soon, I'll create another sculpture ahead of the curve.