After a visit to Utah's Arches National Monument and other Southwest desert sites in the summer of 1975, I returned to my studio inspired. I had ideas for work related to that landscape in various formats, including sculptures, vessels, trays and wall sculptures. The wall works became the predominant format. These ideas occupied me for the next 20 years. The work was always abstracted, to varying degrees. It was also always metaphorical.

The vessels moved from forms that emphasized the vessel presence to those that allowed the sculptural statement to be central with the vessel dimension playing a secondary role. To me the continuum represented in these works was natural and important.