I came to this planet as an agent of Grace. I’m an artist. I use images, gestures, words, objects, sounds, music, dance, performance, events using skills of observation and expression to celebrate the beautiful, sometimes unlikely or disguised. I value freedom, for beauty lives in the eyes of beholders and so, beauty is granted by free observation.

Gesture 111  – An Adaptation of L.V. Beethoven’s Opus 111

By way of inceptional background:

…reading Thomas Mann’s,  Dr. Faustus, written in Munich in 1943 , under aerial bombardment by the allies, it’s a fictional biography of a composer in Germany at the turn of the century and through WWI, a time when autonomous music was in the ritual of life, love and religion for the bourgeois culture. Mann knew music. Between Mann’s  Faustus and Philip Radcliffe’s Beethoven’s String Quartets (1965), I saw a continuity from before Palestrina, through, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler… Schoenberg. The thesis of Dr. Faustus is an extraordinary statement about dehumanization of human beings through culture. Mann’s story draws a distinction about the satanic: in suppressing expressions of our animal nature, bourgeois spirituality makes nature evil. Mann’s man makes a deal with nature, such that he creates a monumental work in music in exchange for his soul.