Horizon - 2005  
       1-10
       11-22
       23-32

"Lives of great people all remind us
We can make our lives sublime.
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."

- adapted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The painting process has always served as a natural means to fulfill a need to express emotions. I have been a painter for 30 years, exhibiting in this country, Japan and Europe. Recently this same need to express has expanded to the ceramic process.

My images in painting express the daily passions: the life force and resiliency of our physical lives. In ceramics I express the truth about the fragile, fleeting, temporary nature of our lives.  The truth that we are all aware of, but rarely acknowledge: we pass on from this life.  This is a difficult thing for human beings to know.  We are the only living beings who are aware that there is an end.

But I do not look at the urns and see death.  I see my life and your life.  They are a reminder that we have this gift of life for a very short time, and we thus need to live fully and joyfully.  Nothing in this life is without two sides: hot-cold, light-dark, happy-sad, life and death. I make these urns to glorify the majesty of this contrast, without which our lives cannot exist.

Making the urns is giving me a way to approach the end of my own life and to accept and rejoice in this inevitable event.  I began with making my own funerary urn with surprising joy and exuberance.  At the time I didn't know I was embarking on a mission.  My painting clients were very moved at this unusual expansion of my art.  They began to commission their own urns.  Now that I am making urns for others this act has brought us together to ponder many important questions.

I have called this collection "Sands of Time" because of a recent serendipitous meeting in Cuba.  I did not have a name for the upcoming show in New York, but I knew, somehow, I would find a title for it in Cuba.  Mid-way through the trip, I met a beautiful Cuban poet who gave me a book of her poems in Spanish; the title of the book in English was "The Sands of Time."  It was dedicated to the memory of her father, who had died recently.  It seemed to me it could not be more appropriate since sand is the one essential ingredient of ceramics, and these ceramic urns hold our "sand" which is left when our time here is over.

Mud, sand and water pass through my hands, and with the process of fire turns these basic elements into an urn.  Both urn and body go through a form of alchemy that touches the core of life's mysteries, mysteries we must bow down to and accept with equal awe.  

This is a complete and beautiful cycle.  From dust we are created, and to dust we return.  Together, our ashes and the urns unite with the earth once again to grow and nurture in ways we cannot fathom.

Click here to see the Urns