After spending more than two decades as a graphic designer, art director, design and business consultant, I was hungry for the more direct experience I had with my hands when I first started my career in graphic design. Before Apple computers, Adobe Photoshop and iPhones, there was rubylith, ruling pens, and photostat machines. Design had a significant component of craft that one had to master to realize one's ideas. Not that the skills that today's students of design must master to be successful aren't important. Most of them are the same ones I had to wrestle with and develop. The difference for me is that today's skills sets seem primarily located and perpetually stimulated in the left cerebrum and rational areas of the brain. Besides their ingenuity, the primary tool used by designers is the computer. When I started there were so many different tools to play with. I missed the pleasure and excitement that would come to different parts of my body through hand-eye-brain cooperation. I longed for the meditative-type of experience that came from practicing how to balance the ruling pen between three fingers to draw out a long, evenly drafted rule by hand. I felt privileged to use the same language and terms to specify type that had been used since the fifteenth-century.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against computers or technological progress. I am not a hopeless romantic for the past. On the contrary, I have and use many twenty-first century gadgets and technology and find them useful if not exciting. I just also have not lost my appreciation for the benefits, joys and intelligence that resides in my two hands. Some of what I miss is lost and some of what I hope is gained is an integrity that in different ways continues to encourage the evolution of the profession.

This portfolio includes samples of work from about ten years of new explorations and investigations using wood, found objects, mixed and digital media. With the language of furniture as a jumping off point, I produce work that moves in between art, craft and design. It is through this work, which also includes curating and writing, that I instigate conversations about things that are important or of interest to me.