I was born in in 1945 Hillcrest Hospital which was built in the 1930's and was recently torn down.  A testament to the "oldness" now of the babies that were born there.   My parents lived in Bayard and my father owned and operated his own Texaco gas station and was "the man who wore the star".   I started painting when i was in grade school with two old aunts, Mina Booth, who lived in Bayard, and her sister, Mark Tirey, who lived in Hillsboro, NM.  One of my first paintings was of one of our horses named "Honey Pot" and is in this exhibit only because my mother saved it all these years and she kept the still life also in this show from when i was in Cobre High School.  The only two paintings that survive from that period of my life.  I was lucky at Cobre to have Ken Sparks as my art teacher and he was a huge influence in my life.  I attended WNMU after high school and was lucky to have Dorothy McCray and Cecil Howard as my instructors throughout the five years I was there.   "Dear by a pond" and "Dead Bird" are among the few paintings that survived from that period as are 3 or 4 of the pots in the show as I took pottery from Cecil in 1964 and have never stopped making things out of clay. 
    I was also lucky enough to hang out with some pretty neat people at the University who were interested in starting a museum here.  Dr. John Harlan and Dr. Leon Bower were friends at the University and they thought I would made a fine Curator since I was young and could do a lot of the physical work that had to be done to turn the Ailman house into a Historical Museum.  I was attending Western on a scholarship my last year and had my senior show the same year that we opened the museum in 1967.   I painted in the downstairs kitchen in the back.  Some of the paintings in this exhibit were painted while I was on duty so to speak.................I painted mostly at night and on Mondays, my day off.  The museum gave me an opportunity to learn about and handle many kinds of artifacts.  And with luck Beth Menczer moved here from Conneticutt as an already accomplished potter and became the Museum secretary.  Later on she and I would teach classes in Pre-Columbian pottery techniques.  At the same time one of her friends from Pinos Altos, a young and beautiful Susan Berry came in and started volunteering her time to help with whatever needed to be done and was hired as our assistant director and took over for me when I left because painting and pottery overcame my desire to be at the Museum and I resigned in 1982 and opened "What's a Pot Shop" which I have been running ever since.  I have no idea how to explain my desire to create something comes from but I have never stopped and there probably isn't much chance that I ever will unless I kick the bucket.  In my 60 years I have made so much "stuff".   Even when I am making pots I am still painting.  The museum gave me an opportunity to learn about and handle many kinds of artifacts.  I borrowed part of the Eisley Collection from WNMU before the Museum was started up there so people coming to Grant County could at least see something of the Mimbreno culture.  Some of the drawings on paper in this exhibit were inspired by the pottery as I would draw at night in the Museum since I lived upstairs as the night watchman also.  In the 70's I had an African exhibit of artifacts that we borrowed from Dr. Bob Miller who was also in the Science Department at Western and had lived in Africa and had an extensive collection of sculptures and textiles which he so graciously loaned us.   Many of my clay sculptures were based on ideas that I got from having these things in my life.  I was lucky to meet Mr. Sterling Darwood who loaned us his bronze sculptures from Thailand which also were much fun to get to display for almost two years in our Museum.   I also was lucky to get to travel to Museums when I was in high school and college like in El Paso, Tucson, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe.   I still travel to museums when ever I get the chance.  With my friend Trish Geels, who also enjoys museums, I have been lucky enough to get to go Sweden, New Zealand, and Peru.  Thanks to my stint in the Army I got to travel throughout Europe.
   This exhibit includes just a fraction of the kinds of things that I have been interested in trying.   Art for me has always been a learning experience.   If I saw something I liked I would try to make my own thing in my own way like it.   In clay,  that would mean exploring the techniques of making pottery throughout history.  I call many of my pottery pieces made at certain times my Egyptian period or my Pre-Columbian period because I was trying to learn about and make things like and fire my work using wood or dung and local clays that I would process.   I was never really a utlitarian potter.................like Cecil, who was my pottery teacher, I liked making bottles, which are useless but in the 60's practically everybody was making weed pots in the USA at Universities.  From my love of Art History sprang my Abstract Expressionists paintings which I have a few examples of in this exhibit to some attempts at super realism and from my love of early American landscape painters like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt came my landscape paintings which also gave me the opportunity to get out of my studio as much as I could and travel and paint in the Gila National Forest and that is pretty much what I am still doing today.  My work does not fit into any specific kind of catagory because I was never interested in doing just one thing all my life...........life is to short and there are too many things to learn about and one way to that is immerse yourself in a period of time and learn about why things were made the way they were ..........like 1100 AD...............the Mimbres Indians here were making pots.............but so were the Etruscans in Italy and the Joman in Japan, all using different techniques.   One of my favorite sayings is from a song by Laurie Anderson and sort of fits right into how I have enjoyed my life, "history is like an angel being blown backwards into the future!".