When I was in grade school I was fascinated by ancient civilizations, and especially by their sculpture. This archaeological passion has stayed with me throughout the years. I have a few nice pieces of ancient sculpture in my collection. Later on, in High School, I was very moved and impressed by Renaissance Italian sculpture, then later still with Roman 17th century sculpture. Working in the years after Yale at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I became conversant in many styles and cultures. But a big revelation for me in my sculptural education came in 1982 when the Metropolitan opened its Rockefeller Wing, with its rich collection of ethnographic art. It really hasn't been until very recently that I've started looking at contemporary sculpture, and I feel I have a good framework for judgment now. I always look for sculpture that deals with the same formal problems I'm interested in so I can see different results, different solutions.

I can remember the first sculptural piece I did that definitely gave me a powerful aesthetic experience was a shark that I conceived and constructed by myself one afternoon when I was five and a half years old. My mother had told me the story of Roy Chapman Andrews, who had constructed a full-sized replica of a whale at the Museum of Natural History in New York out of papier-mache applied over a wire mesh support. I had never seen this whale but the description of this man's artistic project thrilled me somehow, and I wanted to create a whale as he had done. Not knowing the technique of papier-mache, I just used sheets of newspaper, and scissors, and tape. I spent the whole afternoon totally immersed in my artwork. The finished whale was about four feet long, and rested on the floor. I thought to myself that this couldn't be a whale, in no way was it big enough, so I decided that it was a small shark instead. To give shape to materials so as to create a Representation, was what I learned to do that day.

Time is as much my medium as space. I have experienced my life as an artist as following a path of one insight after another. This might not be an evolutionary process, but in my case it was. This evolutionary change through time is sometimes punctuated by sudden breakthroughs, which seem dramatic to me or someone else. It could be seen as a sporadic or chaotic process that smooths out over a lifetime, decade after decade, into a consistent expansion. The way it often feels to me as I work is that it is a process of finding old threads constantly and weaving them into a solution to a present problem. I had been a painter up through my twenties, and all of a sudden, while playing with some clay one night, I had a glimpse of a whole unexplored field. I knew that I had found something that would lead me into a great expansion. But this epiphany was only the accident of actually sitting down and working the clay on that night, and not another night, after years of having it on my mind, but always seeming to rule it out. So from the year 1981 onwards, I decided I would call myself a sculptor as my primary identifier. My first sculptural work was classical Western in its inspiration and form. But almost from the start there were other shoots growing out from the main Classical stem that went elsewhere. Most of my work relates to a family of artistic problems that are apparently distinct, and yet, according to my faith, they are all derivable from a more deeply underlying theory of structure.

For sculpture I use clay most of the time. My favorite medium is bronze, but of course it is not the working medium, but a medium of translation, that is the medium of the final piece, which is based on a clay model. Most of my clay pieces, almost all of them, are intended models for bronzes. However, I do produce other clay sculptures that could truly be called "ceramic sculpture", whose intended medium is earthenware, sometimes unglazed, but at other times polychromed or glazed. For practical reasons, I fire exclusively in the low or earthenware temperature range. I rely heavily on commercial hobby-craft glazes and underglazes for my polychrome effects.

For two dimensional work I prefer ink on paper, with my favorite colors being sepia, black India Ink, gray and white. Working over the surface of a sheet of paper I often use a sponge or piece of toweling dipped in ink. As the sponge dries out, the marks made by rubbing are lighter, fuzzier. I love to make artist-books, or sketch-books. Often the first time an idea comes to me it is in a drawing, then, later on, I work out the three-dimensional solution.

My latest project is to investigate how to create large-scale concrete sculpture. I have severe space limitations at the present, however.

My favorite piece is a small terracotta figure in the Classical style that I did for Lincoln Kirstein. I liked it because it turned around almost perfectly, just the way a classical figure should, with new views of the pose appearing as the figure is continuously rotated, providing a moving picture. I have tried hard to surpass this very exciting go-around in a piece, but haven't as yet succeeded. This piece was the best solution I've created for this problem, one of a number of essential problems that have fascinated me through the years.

I remember once reading a comment that Magdalena Abacanowicz made when asked what artists inspired her. She remarked that she would rather visit a high-energy Hadron Collider facility for her inspiration than go out visiting the galleries or museums.  It is exactly the way I feel. The awe of scientific discovery, the same awe that is apparent in the drawings and bookworks of DaVinci, is what inspires me to create forms and topologies. I feel that in some way I'm working on a visualization of a theory of space/time in parallel to physicists and mathematicians..

Like everybody else I admire art for its idiosynchrasies and creative surprises. To what extent do they arise from an individual mind, from a particular sequence of experiences? Murray Gell-Mann speaks eloquently about what he calls "frozen accidents" in history, from a standpoint of quantum theory. I do know that the personality of a living breathing artist is in no way derivable from the evidence of his work. Art biographers and novelists to the contrary. This was Rocquentin's inevitable disappointment in his own historical work.

I have been influenced by other artists, those in museums, and those I know or have known, and by the anonymous artists who made the pieces of artwork I have collected. But I am most compelled by art periods and styles. There is a particular genius in every style-period, and each has its individual masters. Most of the individuals who made the sculptures I admire, are unknown to me.

The Force was strong in both of them. Picasso was a pure classicist. His sculpture is largely serene and delightful. Particularly his ceramic pieces, of which I just saw a terrific sampling at the Met last fall. Like a true classicist he surprises while being totally lucid.

Moore I confess I know first hand only by a few examples in America. For a long time I didn't appreciate negative curvature in sculpture. Most sculptural traditions avoid it. But it appears strongly in my own work, and now I accept it. Even though the idea of making a sculpture out of so many holes was revolutionary, Moore's actual process of generating surfaces was conservative, even academic, so far as I can determine by examining the pieces known to me.