Lute and Banjo Music by the Artist

Both my sculpture creation and music performance are inspired by my longstanding interest in comparative cultures and history.

The literary aspects of these topics were, by definition, central to my professional anthropological career. But underlying the purely academic and theoretical were always aesthetic and personal pulls to particular subject matters.

The "wide open spaces' of my childhood cowboy and Indian fantasies---reenergized in my college years by the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" in particular---led to a doctorate in Anthropology based on research in the latter-day "wild west" of the Pakistan borderlands (when they were a bit less pathologically wild than at present!).

My serendipitous mid-life discovery of sculpting aptitudes and techniques, along with involvement in the bronze casting process at numerous art foundries, gave me a hands-on involvement in ancient technologies I'd always admired and taught. This gave new and tangible meaning to the inherently dramatic subject matter from my academic research, teaching and writing, ranging from Native American, Middle Eastern and prehistoric cultures through ancient and medieval history.

As a long time "folky" musician on banjos and guitars it wasn't a huge leap technically to playing Renaissance music on period replica instruments, and learning such tunes from facsimile manuscripts of the 17th century, an effort that began at about the same time as my "sculpting lightbulb" switched on.

Both were aspects of my desire to "do" and personalize culture---not just study it from an emotional distance.

For me, both the "dashingness" of playing an Elizabethan galliard or almaine and executing a bronze of a galloping Crusader or Native American bison hunter come from the same emotional and aesthetic sources and produce similar satisfactions.

I hope viewers and listeners enjoy my efforts.