You've mentioned that you had a hard time in school. Still, you were accepted at Pratt Institute, which is quite selective. How did this come about?
School days. I had a difficult time in early school with math and reading and writing. I struggled a lot and was shamed for not working hard enough. Those were the days where there wasn’t much remedial help for kids like me. My grades were pretty poor so getting into college was a problem. I excelled at science and photography as a teen and was obsessed with taking pictures and also being in the darkroom. My father helped me build my darkroom in our basement and I spent countless hours figuring out what was going on. I had a substantial portfolio of work by the time I finished high school that got me over the finish line getting into Pratt Institute, albeit, on academic probation for the first six months.

How has failure been involved in your creative process?
As a kid, I was always building “things”—wooden go-carts or homemade balsa gliders—and often these were failures, but I kept on building them until one flew, or made its way down the driveway without falling apart. To this day I still fail, but I fail better now. It’s actually a curious thing to keep going after failure. I’m a bit driven to attempt mastery of a process. I guess I don’t look at failure as an end, but a beginning.

What was it like attending Pratt Institute?
Attending Pratt Institute was a revelation, an explosion of new ideas and influences. It was a time of experimentation that became more sophisticated and complex. Working alongside other brilliant artists and their impact on my path was life changing. I’m still compelled to “play” in my studio with new ideas and tools.

During my Pratt years I met jewelry designers and architects and sculptors and painters. How could I not want to play in their sandboxes?

As I began my second year at Pratt in photography, I soon butted heads with the professors over what I should be photographing. They wanted me to be a documentary photographer and I was looking more to series and theatrical works that they had no patience for, even laughing at what I was doing (here we go again!).  They suggested I leave and go out on my own. A lovely woman in guidance connected me with Neil Selkirk, a photographer in New York who, as it turned out, was the printer of the Diane Arbus work, and soon I was in the darkroom printing her work! Another revelation!

Diane Arbus! Yes, a revelation for all of us. What came next?
From there, I worked on Richard Avedon’s portfolio for his first Metropolitan Museum show with Randal Levensen. I spent several years in that world printing others: Horst, Andy Summers of the Police, Joel Meyerowitz. My printing partner and I were one of the few fine art printers in NYC at that time. Eventually I burned out and HAD to get out of the dark into the light!

When and why did you decide to move in Maine?
My partner Gail and I moved to Maine in 2003. We had been living in a small town outside of Princeton, N.J., and I had a studio in Trenton—a big old brick crucible factory building that was occupied by many fellow artists. We also had a studio apartment in the NYC in the West Village.

Things got a little hairy after the World Trade Center was attacked by madmen, and another dusted our mail with anthrax! It also began to take longer and longer to get from one place to another because of the traffic. New York was shaken and so were we. Gail had brought me to Maine for a month in the summer early in our relationship and subsequent years. She had gone to Colby College and had vacationed there with her kids. We made the decision to move when a grandkid was born and haven’t looked back. We still had our place in NYC until 2010 when we just weren’t getting down as often as we once did. NYC changed for us and we’ve become content to visit a couple of weeks a year now for our “fix.”

I don't think I've ever talked with a fine artist (visual) and maker who is also an actor and produced playwright. Tell me everything!
I had grown up in a theater household. My father was an actor and director, and my mother was president of the New Jersey Shakespeare festival at one point, so I spent a lot of time backstage and also seeing plays. The professional theatre is just one big gobsmack of delight and magic! And tragedy to say the least.

I never did want to be on the stage like my brother has, but I was so taken with the likes of Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard that I just had to explore those deep veins of emotion. I wrote plays all the while building a bronze tile business (I needed to make a living!). Metaphor Bronze Tileworks continues to this day and afforded me to build the large studio I have today.

One of my plays, Ragman’s Roll, made its way to the O’Neill Theater conference as a semi-finalist after workshopping at the Edward Albee Theater conference in Alaska, of all places. Alas, the theater as a going concern was changing and I saw my fellow playwrights crying themselves to bed for want of an opportunity. I had a brief moment in New York theater belonging to the Cherry Lane Theater playwright’s group and studying acting at HB Studios that I truly loved and now miss.

Where do you feel most comfortable and the most challenged with the artist process?
I find working with my hands and varied materials second nature. It’s an obsession really. I think there is very little difference between art forms, or better yet, one feeds the other. I can mostly hold many balls in the air at once. The reality is most projects need time to dry so one moves onto another and then circles back to the first. It’s actually an efficient way of work, except maybe painting, but that takes time to dry in between layers for me.