I’ve always loved the art of sculpture, especially works by Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Henry Moore, Auguste Rodin, Claes Oldenburg, Kurt Schwitters and the brilliant Icelandic sculptor Asmundur Sveinsson, whose home museum-studio I once visited during a trip to Iceland. For a few years, I created sculptures out of metal objects I found by roadsides and in real estate property basements using an oxygen-acetylene welding torch. The picture below shows an exhibit of five of my metal sculptures at an art show in Chicago around 1998-1990. From the left, the names of the sculptures are “Bo Diddley’s Got The Beat,” “Monk’s Got Spunk,” “Shoeshine,” “He Knows The Angles” and “Mr. Archibeque’s Lean Dream.” I still create occasional sculptures from time to time out of found objects such as copper gutter pieces, wood, and furnace thermocouples. (Oftentimes, I feel like I’m making miniature sculptures with my poems, too!)

Also, while I was in college at the University of Notre Dame, I took a number of art courses, including ceramics, and I loved working in the Old Fieldhouse on the campus (the old basketball and track arena) that housed the art department (including the ceramics department, which was located on a portion of the old basketball hardwood floor). I created a number of fanciful, surreal/pop art ceramic objects during the ceramic classes I took, which are shown below (an upright piano with a lightbulb and switch on its side; a can of Stroh’s beer, a ceramic toaster, two hands holding a poker hand of cards in front of a lit candle and poker chips, a Budda/incense holder. I also took a wood-working course at Notre Dame and created several sculptures, one of which is shown below (a cut, layered, glued and carved abstract plywood sculpture). I tried many times to get into a stone carving course taught by sculptor Ivan Mestrovic at Notre Dame, but when I was finally an upper classman and could possibly get in to this highly in-demand course, Mr. Mestrovic was ill and no longer teaching. (His wonderful sculptures are all over the Notre Dame campus.) I still have fond memories of living in the Old Fieldhouse my senior year at Notre Dame as the live-in custodian and hanging out with all of the art students & teachers in the painting room (the old boxing room on the 2nd floor of the Fieldhouse), the ceramic students & teachers (on the old basketball floor), the etching students & teachers and the woodworking and welding students. Sometimes I’d come back to the Fieldhouse at night and there would be a band playing on the basketball floor, or painters throwing snowballs back and forth, or bats chasing me as they swooped down from the steel girder rafters. What a marvelous place to absorb the arts. Sometimes, I’d even play guitar and sing at the art openings in the gallery across the hall from my high ceilinged room in the Fieldhouse on the first floor. It was a fantastic experience to be surrounded by the arts & one that I’ll never forget.