I am a figurative sculptor. I have spent my career exploring the human form. I work from the live model, and the figures are done from the nude. Many have been done directly at life size scale and quite often larger. I work alongside the model in order to observe the complexities of form that present themselves during what is often years of work for each sculpture.
     In this way I have provided myself a lab (of sorts) where for almost thirty years, and with hundreds of models, the human being has been my subject of study. In my book, "The Good Back: the Riddle of the Sphinx and the Mysteries of the Spine Solved"; I refer to my life as follows: "I am by profession a sculptor, and as a result took up the study of anatomy with certain advantages available to artists that are not common to the scientific community. I"ve spent most of my life with people who are nude. I get to watch them move, to walk and, most difficult of all, struggle to stand. I consider the job of a sculptor, an obligation to figure out just exactly how people accomplish those rudimentary tasks. This, along with the exploration of human structure through the study of anatomical dissection over the course of twenty years has given me a point of reference, which is unique. The immersion in human form has given me an awareness of the behaviors our structures are capable of; and has truly put me 'inside the machine'. The meaning in human movement is my life's work and its beauty my minds obsession".
     I have spent many years teaching sculpture, drawing and human anatomy in the great art schools of New York City. I began my teaching career in 1982 at the New Manhattan School, which one year later became The New York Academy of Art. I held my drawing classes in the cast hall of the N.Y. Academy building on Lafayette St, in the East Village. In the cast hall, plaster copies of Michelangelo's river gods and slaves, and the Nidian Aphrodite stared mutely out on the students and models, exercising themselves against this backdrop of the gods.
     Here, we set about trying to understand how the sculpture around us had ever taken place. To this end, and in the years before the human body again became a legitimate subject for the serious artist, my models, as vigorous a lot as could ever be imagined, took their poses, in order to unveil to us, students all; secrets of the impossible. What had our forebears wrought, and how?
     From where, in the bodies, of mere mortals, could this sense of ourselves, as giants have come from? How did the mind ever become so invested in the analysis of its' own being; as to have imagined us so, that from the point of a pencil, such form burst forth?
How, at the end of the twentieth century, would we to be able to find the means to create for ourselves, in an ancient medium; form and meaning that could hold it's place against architecture that scraped the sky and technology that had already sent man to the moon?
     In an art world that had long considered any representation the province of sunday painters and the human figure to be the domain of dilettantes and dabblers, we set about finding a means of reintegrating science and art, that would not be a recherche revisionism of an academic style or otherwise anachronistic reaction to the depletions of modernism.
These pages offer some images of my thoughts on the matter; My work, the embodiments of many years of my attempts to solve the problem of the nude in the new world.