Bio
I began my artist journey at 15, when an elfin high school teacher, Hazel Loew, infused me with her energy and love for art and design. Originally, I decided to become a potter and built my own throwing wheel and kiln. This marked a path of building things, which took me from clay pots to Industrial Design at the University of Illinois where I met the first of three mentors, professor Ed Zagorski.
Zagorski introduced me to the world of design: automobiles, furniture, appliances and toys. I was hooked. Designing children’s toys and games became the creative grail I had been seeking. After graduation, I worked for the independent, Chicago-based toy genius, Marvin Glass, who became my second mentor.
For seven years, as Glass mentored me in toy design, he simultaneouslyintroduced me to the world of collecting fine art. Glass was an extensive collector whose home was filled with originals—Salvadore Dali and Picasso, among others. The Glass toy studio where I worked was also filled with art: Chagall prints and original sculptures by Frank Gallo, who had also been my sculpture teacher at the University of Illinois.
The first piece of fine art I owned was a gift from Mr. Glass, a sculpture by Robert von Neumann. As a partner in the firm of Marvin Glass and Associates, when Marvin Glass passed away I continued to run the company from 1976 until 1988 when I started my own toy design firm with partners Howard Morrison and Rouben Terzian. We went on to create one of the largest independent toy design studios in the world. I was the president of Big Monster Toys from 1988 until 2006 when I stepped down as CEO to pursue a full-time career as a sculptor.
Throughout my 41 years as a professional toy designer, sculpting has always been my second passion. I studied with sculptor Susan Clinard from 2003 to 2007, defining my bronze figurative work with complementary sections of felled trees. This work with Clinard culminated in a 26–piece sale that raised over $40,000 for the University of Chicago’s Comer Children’s Hospital in 2006. Today my work centers around large abstract pieces that combine granite boulders and sections of fallen trees. I’m in love with nature, and enjoy the playful, seemingly impossible contrast of balancing granite boulders, which are hundreds of pounds and millions of year old, with trees that are a mere hundred, or so, years ‘young.’