I’m not going to write this in the third person like most artists would. I’m the one writing it, so why wouldn’t I just explain my art in the first person? I’ve always wondered about that. Anyway, here it goes.

I’ve been creating art pretty much all my life. I don’t know where the drive comes from, but I’ve always loved making “stuff”. It’s exciting to take an idea from my mind and turn it into something physical that can be shared with other people. For the last 15 years or so, I have constantly been trying to find a way to create art that has never been seen before. I’ve been successful in this endeavor in many aspects of my art including my work with three-dimensional layered drawings, diorama sculpture, and pointillistic relief sculpture.

While still creating art for walls, desktops and window sills, I recently found myself wanting to find a way to create functional art that I’d never seen. I love hats, so I started to develop an idea that hadn’t been done before. Wood on hats. It seemed like kind of an abstract concept, but I wanted to see if I could turn a hat into a workable canvas for my art to be displayed. I had seen embroidered patches on hats, and they always look great, but they’re everywhere. Leather is a newer medium which looks amazing, but it’s also already been done. My idea was to somehow adhere wood to a hat. I had never seen a wooden image on a hat before, so I decided to move in that direction.

I was excited about the unique idea of wooden images on hats, but after months of experimentation, it didn’t seem like it was going to be possible. Thin wood veneer is brittle and not very durable on a flexible surface. After many frustrating trials, I finally found a workable veneer that made my idea possible.

Once the wood problem was solved, it was time to figure out how to cut the images out, then adhere them to fabric and protect them from sun and water. This turned out to be harder than I had expected, but after lots of annoying failures, I put together the right combination to make it all work. I won’t reveal all the secrets, but the end result turned out to be a unique way to display my art for everyone to see.

I’m constantly coming up with new designs to be added to hats along with different techniques for displaying my art. The constant swirling of ideas in my mind makes it exciting to know that this will be an ever-evolving project. I can’t wait to see what comes next!