Two decades later a distinct desire to be of service to the arts and the inner compass still strong, I entered the MAT program at MICA, the very one I teach for now.

I love working in most media, which suits teaching perfectly. My personal artwork references ancient and archetypal ideas. Many of my aesthetic influences are from growing up on a farm in Pennsylvania. I began to appreciate things like the way someone might use wire or other materials to quickly mend a fence and how it weathered years later, catching tufts of animal hair. Unusual combinations of materials are still a primary way of teaching and making art. At a time when it was uncommon, my sculpture looked like artifacts, metaphoric adornment, and accoutrements. "Romancing" sites such as Stonehenge with a series of large wood-fired plates, or Tibet, with fashioned collections and installations of "relics", I was conjuring places and cultures through pieces that instinctively invoked genuine attributes (as I found out later after actually visiting those sites). It follows that I began to study archaeology, do field work and research, briefly in England, and now in Russia, Mongolia, and Iran. Photography became the primary medium for documenting travels and creating work for publication and display. Travel continues to knit together Eurasian culture and history. Within this vast puzzle new pieces beckon: the Caucasus, Kyrgyzstan, the Gorno Altai, promising the remarkable. History and culture are made visible through art. It is the lens for viewing life contextually and valuing differences.

This propensity for antiquity led to work on two monumental sculpture projects: I assisted sculptor Alan LeQuire for the first three years on the full-scale construction phase of the 41-foot 10-inch tall statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon, Nashville Tennessee. The fiberglass-reinforced gypsum statue, which stands gilded today, is considered (aside from modern materials) a reasonably accurate reconstruction of the original wood and chryselephantine original, and it is the western hemisphere's tallest indoor freestanding statue.

When visiting Japanese sculptors constructed a monumental wood statue on the Maryland Institute campus in 1990, I researched, designed curriculum, and helped develop a school tour program during the statue's unique construction period. With Graduate Art Education Dean, Dr. Karen Carroll, we co-authored the curriculum guide, Fudo Myoh-Oh, Japanese Sculpture Project.

Experience reinforces my teaching philosophy that the arts are essential to knowing, expressing, and solving problems in ways that constitute a whole education, a whole life. In addition to continuing at MICA, I retired from 23 years teaching Elementary Public School Art to develop a PreK - 9th-grade art program for the Montessori School of Westminster, MD.

The joy of teaching is in the shared wonder of discovery and play-as- learning for both MICA's Young People's Studio Programs and Montessori. The directness and purity of children's visual expressions keep me aesthetically fulfilled and freshly challenged in my own art making. Working with such brilliant Art Education majors at MICA allows me to share current perspectives as an art teacher and, in turn, MICA's emerging artist/teachers further my professional development by pursuing cutting-edge ideas and continual mindfulness toward crafting best practices in art education. Designing art problems, testing ideas, and seeing the resultant artwork and its transformative effects on young artists is, for me, a work in progress - making choices, and articulating ideas into form.