I am a 54 year old self-taught sculptor. We live in the Piedmont Hills of North Carolina, immersed in the old hardwood forest, close to where I was raised. My artistic life has had four major influences that have inspired me this lifetime. My young and formative years were spent in the woods growing up on a nineteenth century farm in the twentieth century. I traveled while in the service being especially influenced by my time spent in Japan. This broadening of my horizons and opening of my mind and consciousness was a great turning point for me, and delivered me back to North Carolina with a different perspective. I was introduced as a young man to eastern Mysticism and to belief systems that fit readily into the feelings that I had experienced in nature, and even in a more p