Living in Phoenix, Arizona as a ceramic artist and educator of ceramics and drawing at Paradise Valley Community College, I have had many influences on my professional development.
          My first artistic influence was television, which was an exciting window to new places, people and events. The constantly shifting shapes and colors and sounds provided my early stimulus. My mother encouraged me to read and draw and create things out of scraps of cloth and paper, and later, crayons – expressing perspectives of my own environment.
          My most profound influences on later choices continued to be my parents. They were very actively creating and learning, professionally and personally. My mother, a certified florist, loved to experiment with new plants in her garden and with recipes in the kitchen. Her creativity also included sewing, knitting, embroidering, and tatting lace. My father loved to work in the garden, as well as repair TV’s and radios in his garage workshop, which was a chamber of wonders for me. It was filled with mysterious parts and tools, which for a small child, was like a wizard’s laboratory. My parents instilled in me that to be happy a person should spend time making things. This has stayed with me to this day.
          The next major artistic influence on me was the principal of my elementary school. Every year he would create a mosaic tile panel depicting scenes from our nation’s history to be displayed permanently on the wall of the school cafeteria. He taught me the importance of art which provided reference points for our society to know itself.
          Growing up, I kept drawing and making things for the sheer pleasure of creating. While building structures with Tinkertoys, or mixing chemicals with my chemistry set, I felt the satisfaction of controlling a process, and for the satisfaction that if something good resulted I would be responsible.
          When I was 11 or 12, I expressed a desire to have some real art materials, so my mother bought my first drawing pad and charcoal pencils, along with a book titled, “How to Draw Faces.”
          Soon after, a local painter, Louis Sicard, offered a three-day oil painting workshop which led to four years of classes at the painter’s studio. All this time I was making art for fun, not for its importance, not remembering [or caring?] the lesson learned from my principal.
          In college, I majored in painting through a process of elimination because I couldn’t decide among the many enjoyable creating activities. Ceramics was required for the major, and there I found my calling. I was entranced by the responsiveness of the clay, especially on the potter’s wheel. The slippery coolness sliding under my hands, reacting to my slightest touch, begged my interest. The depth of study allowed by the material meant that many lifetimes would be required to learn it all, and so I dove in headfirst to create all I could.
          I graduated with a degree in painting and many elective hours in ceramics with no idea where to go from there, until I visited a pottery store in a neighboring town, long known for its old time crockery, Marshall Pottery Co. of Marshall Texas. I got a job there as a potter’s helper, and after nine months of practice was awarded an apprentice making “dog dishes”! I learned quickly, and from there learned how to make five gallon capacity butter churns at the rate of 20 per hour!
Fearing I would be limited to churns and jugs, I applied and was accepted into the Master’s degree program in Ceramics at the University of North Texas where I learned about the different ways of glazing, firing and appreciating the aesthetics of ceramics developed during the 20th century. This opened my eyes to what ceramics and art itself was about; ceramics is more than pottery, and art is more than the object which decorates our living room.
          Since graduate school, I have made a living teaching all levels of ceramics and art, and by making objects both utilitarian and sculptural. I relearned the lesson taught to me in elementary school by the principal; art is about those things which the artist and the community think are important, and art provides a way of viewing ourselves and the world in new ways.