January of 2023 was a significant month for me, marking forty years since my wife and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico.  We had been living outside Florence, Italy, and chose to move to Santa Fe from Italy because it wasn’t a huge city and because, at that time, it was a mecca for American artists.  We arrived with a very large station wagon and no money, but Santa Fe was extremely welcoming to us and we both had jobs within a week.  I secured employment at Shidoni, a renowned sculpture foundry, where I quickly advanced to manage the enlargement and mold making department, working for the most important living artists in New Mexico, including Alan Houser and Glenna Goodacre.  After a couple of years, I left Shidoni and started my own business, enlarging, molding, and finishing bronzes for other artists.  After about ten years, I lost this business, due to some unfortunate business decisions but also closed it due to inner frustrations of making other artists’ sculptures look great while lacking time to make my own sculpture.  The late 1990’s proved to be some lean years until I secured a large commission of an abstract fabricated bronze of my own creation for the City of Cerritos, California, in late 1999. 

This was a breakthrough moment in my career, forcing me to realize that I could make a living off my own sculpture.  Despite being turned down over and over again for gallery representation, I persevered when others would’ve given up.  With tons of drive (including physically driving, hauling my large work all over the country), endless effort, and very limited money, I gradually built a business for my sculpture.  I owned and operated an art gallery on the famous Canyon Road in Santa Fe, for approximately ten years, but it was too physically taxing and difficult for me to run the gallery and show my work elsewhere, and I thereafter closed the gallery in favor of the more lucrative tent shows.  The year 2019 was a major year for me, in which I sold two very large sculptures and I became increasingly busy with commissions and sales of my work.  I kept thinking that someone would come along and commission me to do a very large piece, but it just didn’t happen.  In 2020, when the pandemic hit, in order to keep my assistants busy, I decided to stop waiting for a large commission and I started Arches at my own cost.  Because I was still so busy with commissions and because the piece took up so much space in my studio, I had to put Arches on the back burner a few times in order to keep up with my other commitments.

I was finally able to finish Arches in 2022.  While it’s true that the knots I’ve been sculpting for the last several years don’t reflect much of the Southwest, Arches is heavily influenced by the nature in the Western and Southwestern United States.  Included in this show to compliment Arches are an assortment of works I gathered in New Mexico, from the 1920’s to my present work.  It is unfortunate that I could not bring some of the clean air and beautiful blue skies of New Mexico, which has been my home for forty years; where my wife and I raised three beautiful, successful children, and where I built my sculpture career.  I hope that viewers can appreciate the connection I bring between Arches and the other works shown in this space, which is a tribute to my home.