My wife and I moved from Rochester, Minnesota to Reno July of 2022, subsequent to her retiring from the Mayo Clinic there.  This move was essentially a ”coming home” for my wife, who grew up in Bishop and spent every summer working in her dad’s pack station near Mammoth.   My local showing has consisted of my recent participation in a Sierra Arts Foundation benefit in Sparks.  Prior to living in Rochester, we lived in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  Most of the items I made I donated to the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra fund raisers, as a member of the Board of Directors. 

 

While living in Rochester, I showed and sold several items at a major arts store (Jim Krom’s “Natural Images” located below one of the Mayo buildings, where he featured over 100 artists and catered mostly to very wealthy Mayo patients from other countries). Otherwise, I sold my bowls and tables on social media.

 

I believe one of my strong suits is that I “search far and wide” for my woods: my acquisition of sugar maple “cookies” up to five feet in diameter, from an arborist in Rochester; driftwood acquired in a recent trip to the Oregon Coast; lovely redwood burls I found along the Santa Barbara coast; a large shipment of three wood species shipped in from Texas; mesquite I collected in Arizona; exotic woods being “hoarded” by a wood turner in Missouri; a large quantity of burls and other woods sold to me by Amish saw mills in Wisconsin; and chance encounters with people such as the Reno resident who had a whole yard of, and I emphasize new, pieces of new growth redwood.

 

I owe my technical skills to working in my dad’s auto repair shop, spending incalculable hours in my woodworking shop, searching countless sources of information and experiencing an endless number of failures.