Project Info
Project Description
Artist Statement/Bio: A southern-California “desert rat” who moved on from the lower Colorado Desert to the higher desert ranges of the Anza-Borrego,, got baptized into the range profession by John Stechman at Cal Poly in the Central Coast grasslands of California, then on to eastern Oregon where I tortured Tim DelCurto awhile with the others in his first group of grad students, Nebraska, where I gave Don Adams and Walt Schacht a few grey hairs, then on to the front range of Colorado, back to northern California, and now returned to Cal Poly again, teaching about what I saw and learned in those long and interesting travels. My ‘art’ is mostly functional. I picked up various leatherwork skills over the years, starting with the jacket and shotgun chaps I hand-stitched from scratch for my wedding to my darling wife Cindy in 1995. The jacket pattern I worked out from some favorite shirts, and the shotgun chaps from an old pair I found at UNL’s Gudmundsen ranch in western Nebraska. Took months of work and a whole pile of muslin to sort out the elements. I’ve done moccasins and other projects, but my favorite functional piece is my ‘Modoc range-runner.’ That consists of two pieces, a modular thigh holster on the left for my cellphone (running my ArcGIS Collector datalogger for field work), a detachable battery recharger, a bluetooth mic & earbud kit for recording field notes, spare cabling, and knife-sharpening steel. Along the belt on my right hip is the second piece which holds a magnesium fire-starter, hunting knife, a Gerber multi-tool, extra driver tips for the Gerber, a Shure-Fire flashlight, a weatherproof green laser pointer, and spare rechargeable batteries for the light and the laser.