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.

In the desert vessels the sculptural statement becomes central with the vessel aspect playing a secondary role. Most are responses to the flat topped, wide-based mesas of Monument Valley which people often feel are like ships on a parched sea, moving at a pace expressed in eons.