About Me

At the age of 15, during summer vacation, I stumbled onto three pieces of Bronze Age jewelry while helping a school friend’s family dig the foundation for their new house. The pieces were about 3000 years old, broken and twisted, with a beautiful greenish patina. Couldn’t believe it: I was holding something so ancient in my hands!

I managed to recreate one of them from copper wire, with pliers. The result sadly lacked the grace and beauty of the original but that did not matter much.

Boy, was I proud! Carried it around in my pocket, looked at it every five minutes, and would show it to anybody and everybody, whether they wanted to see it or not. That was my first piece.

After some twists and turns in life (having been a printer/compositor, teacher, movie theater manager, etc.), I left my native Hungary for the larger world, and after a series of borderline idiotic, immigrant-type jobs in the US, I returned to my old passion.

I spent years traveling five continents, and always had an eye out for jewelers of the “third world.” It was enlightening for me to see them sitting in their teeny-tiny shops, making beautiful, old-style ethnic jewelry with their (sometimes laughably) inefficient “tools.” If they can do it, I should be able to do it, too!

So the origins of my inspiration are quite clear, yet I hope my work is a fusion of old and new.

I spend the eight months between October and May in Slovenia and Hungary. From early June on through September I am in the little, beautiful, medieval "Künstlerstadt" of Gmünd in Southern Austria, half an hour north of Villach on the Salzburg road. Welcome.