“I could never answer the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" until recently. I realized I always wanted to be a wizard, Merlin, Prospero.rn I was born and raised in Jacksonville and Amelia Island, Fla., sparkling wide rivers, hot, white, empty beaches and volatile lightning storms. During one of my many breaks from college (“hiatuses” or “sabbatical” as I euphemistically explained to my parents, who were becoming ever more positive that I would never get a degree), I could be found anywhere from Mexico to Yugoslavia. In Gainesville, Fla., I found employment at a furniture design and woodworking shop far out on Payne’s Prairie, underneath the lazy Live Oaks. My boss taught me about menial labor, and how much a small task, when repeated well could make a difference. Never cut corners. They will be rounded over for you by things out of your control in the end. Don’t give it a head start. He became my first mentor. He held a mystical belief in woodworking. He was a poet.rn I returned to the University of Florida because it was time to “wrap it up” as my father said, and I chose to major in English, (since I was already half way there) I needed to know more about building things. After graduation, I moved to Freiburg, Germany, and found a job at Galerie Blau, a design firm, and Massiv Moebel Bau, a furniture studio run by another mystical woodworker from Yugoslavia who believed in a design philosophy descendant from Goethe, Anthroposophism. I also learned of the German lighting designer, artist and visionary, Ingo Maurer. He became one of my most influential teachers. After three years of building my portfolio, I applied to the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995 and was awarded a presidential scholarship. Presently, I have my studio in what used to be the cafeteria on the bottom floor of an old telephone factory in Atlanta. When I am not playing with electricity and fire, thinking about my favorite project (always the unfinished design which is slapping the backs of my eyelids in the middle of the night) or running away to the beach house in Florida, (where there is no telephone and nothing to do but sketch, read and have get-togethers which, like Vegas, stay at the beach house), I am playing catch the mouse, learning ballet, building living room forts or watching “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” with my daughter, Charley. We both love Caraticus Potts.”