Born and raised in the Projects I was the baby of seven. We were very poor. At age seven, I discovered I was a naturally talented artist. I started drawing everyday and that evolved into entering my school’s safety poster contest. When I won first place the first time I was so inspired, so I continued to draw regularly, but my families level of poverty meant art supplies were not in the budget. There was a man in our neighborhood that taught a free art class for the local kids which me and two of my sisters joined. He taught us the basic-basics of oil painting and he allowed me to help him make the frames for our paintings. We made them out of quarter round molding purchased at a lumber store. In my early teens, the stepdad of my best friend was a master carpenter, and when I watched him do his work, I was amazed and enamored with him. I had never seen anything like it. My dad passed away when I was six and he was not a carpenter although the building trades were strong within my family. I never forgot this fella named Claude. When I told him how amazed I was at what he could do as a carpenter he said to me, son I can hammer a nail straight and I learned how to use a measuring tape and cut boards…that’s really all. I was so inspired. I became obsessed with learning how to be a carpenter and I did. In my early teens I became a house PAINTER with my uncle, and again, I became very exposed to carpentry being on job sites. I even made a couple of pieces of furniture before the age of 18 and sold them to a couple of neighbors. They loved them, they bragged about them. I never forgot that. I kept thinking these were some very picky people and they loved my carpentry. They loved my furniture design. They displayed them in their homes and cherish them. But eventually, as a 19 year-old I took a completely different career which lasted close to 40 years. Throughout my career the arts kept me drawn in. I continued to draw. I started making furniture, again. By my early 20s I was making kids bunkbed sets, heavily, artistic themed bedrooms with murals on the walls that matched the bedroom clubhouse type set ups that I would build like the ones I built for my kids. I sold several of these to other friends that had kids and through word-of-mouth I sold approximately two dozen my in my early 20s. Life got busy and the arts took a major backseat as I had three children pretty quickly and the day to day became consumed with feeding kids, changing diapers and before I knew it they were about to graduate college. Then snap of the fingers -I’m in my mid 50s. I retired early due to an injury that I received when I was 19 years old that is another story. I’ve had to have several surgeries because of that injury which left me very different so I had to adapt. I was not physically strong enough to make large pieces of furniture which I had been doing for years by this time. I especially loved to take old broken up pieces of discarded furniture, and even parts of homes that were demoed or damaged in storms or ravaged through a fire and I would up-cycle those into furniture. This quickly became too much for my body, so I decided to downsize, but not knowing exactly what to do. I knew that I wanted to do more than just oil painting. I decided to take the leftover scraps from those previously up-cycled pieces of furniture and make art out of it. This is when I landed on the thing that I call UpCycled Functional Art. What others rendered as useless and needed to be discarded, I chose to save from the landfills or the burn pits and turn into a piece of art that was functional. Something that I hoped would become a family heirloom and cherished forever. I finally put myself out there as an artist at the age of 63. For the last 2+ years. I have been doing one series that seems to be very popular. It’s called whatever boxes I take the scraps from the afore mentioned sources and create wooden boxes that can be used for whatever. They all have an artistic flare some even have painting, but they are all 100% UpCycled Functional Art with a story. I seek the story behind the old piece of furniture or piece of lumber off an old home so that I can share that story with the whatever box or other art designed from it. When this is possible, I include the story as part of the art piece. The idea that I can tell the history and continue the story, of something that once meant quite a bit to others is a story in itself. To give something that had a whole life a second life and a second story to tell-it’s just beautiful. It makes me feel young. It makes me feel like I can live forever through my art! We are the sum total of our experiences we are our story. My story is that I am an artist, I do UpCycled Functional Art.