With more than 2,700 breweries currently operating in the U.S. and the craft beer industry enjoying a steady growth rate, there's no doubt why the business of producing beer is gaining unprecedented momentum -- expanding faster than any other time since prohibition ended. 

There was a 15% increase in new breweries from 2012 to 2013 alone and 2014 looks like it will top those numbers! Great news for all the beer drinkers - as availability and selection border on gluttonous. But planning and starting a brewery is far from quick and easy and definitely not for the casual businessperson, faint of heart, impatient or corner-cutter. The industrial brewery environment requires skills and procedures that come from safe brewing experience and is an unforgiving place for the inexperienced. 

That said, love of beer alone will not take a brewer or brewery very far - because going from grain to glass is a multi-dimensional undertaking requiring passion, experience, and sweat. Beyond the initial investment expenses and acquisition of equipment brewhouse, fermenters, kegs, barrels, space - there is the lengthy, tedious and careful process of state and federal permitting. Then readying the facility is where the focus moves to drains, flooring, and coolers.

When the film broke $200 million at the box office, Disney broke their promise to Williams.

Robin Williams was very upset with Disney. A few years later Disney to make good gave Williams a late Picasso painting (not the one in the photo) 

Williams never fully forgave Disney.  

I employ a variety of techniques. I learned ceramics mostly from apprenticing in a production pottery studio when I was a kid. I have become more interested in the ceramic process recently, but for the most part I use clay as a medium to achieve a particular end. That is not to say that I abandon craft but I tend to let the vision guide the construction and not the other way around. I have had over 30 years experience working with clay so I feel comfortable with the medium but I will abandon process if it becomes unnecessary or gets in the way of where I want a piece to go.

I would consider my style a miss mash of Punk Rock, Pop Surrealist, and Pre-Columbian imagery with some 1950's advertisement thrown in for good measure. So really it is just a reaction to the things I like that are around me everyday. I have a fairly large collection of paintings and I look to artists out side of ceramics for inspiration

Santa Fe is like no other city in the US and if you add in Northern New Mexico you get a landscape and a people that are more unique than anyplace on the Earth. The original inhabitants can trace their history back Tens of THOUSANDs of years, newcomers (The Spanish) can go back 500 years and us Johnny come latelys (Anglos mostly) have been migrating to New Mexico since the Mexican American War and there was a big influx of artists in the 1920s. It is a very welcoming place. 

Northern New Mexico is very laid back and very liberal. I sometimes call it the Island of Misfit Toys, because if you don’t fit in anywhere else you can fit in here. I also call it the Land of Shirley MacClaine I don’t think I need to explain that. There is a very lively arts scene; you might say you can’t spit without hitting an artist. And it runs the gamut from very traditional style painters ie landscape, still lives, portraits, figurative style bronze work, to cutting edge installation and performance and everything in between. Imagine a 400-year-old city in the middle of the wilderness, desert on one side old growth forested mountains on the other with about 60,000 inhabitants, yet there is a world class opera and opera house, a symphony, a dozen major museums over 300 galleries, restaurants, shops, micro breweries, I could go on. It’s really quite something. But you have to dig in, get to know the place, it can be like the five blind men describing an elephant. You can’t just sit and wait for it to reveal itself to you. You have to let down your guard and be willing to get off the beaten path. I think that to some visitors it has a "Mall Like" feel to it, at least on the surface. Some people come here expecting a Disneyland experience and leave not ever knowing where they were or what they missed.

I would say that Michael Lucero was an early influence on me as far as ceramics are concerned. But most of my influences come from painters like Mark Ryden, Kenny Scharf, Todd Schorr, Keith Haring. I was influenced very early on by Punk Rock, I was living in London at the time that the Sex Pistols, Siouxie and the Banshees, Chron Gen, The X-Ray Specs, etc were on the scene. I still listen to that music and the new stuff today. I would also say I have been heavily influenced by the ceramics from Pre-Columbian civilizations most notably, Teotihuacan, Mayan, and the Tsistiquate, but not limited to those, also many Peruvian and Andean cultures.

I don’t really have an answer for this question. I use commercial glazes in my work and can usually anticipate what the outcome will be. There is some variation that happens when you give up a piece to the fire but in today’s world I don’t see any reason why I should not use commercial glazes any more that I would expect a painter to be grinding their own pigment and mixing their own medium. Naturally if something does go awry I pull out the paint, in fact some of my surfaces are entirely painted or a combination of paint and glaze. 

Yes here is a description of an installation I am building for the “End of Days” exhibit that will be taking place this fall in Santa Fe.

The piece is titled "Bride of the Bomb" 

 

My plan is this.

 

The small pieces are going to be based on these ghost figures that I have various molds of, they are from the nineteen fifties and look like a person wrapped in a sheet carrying a pumpkin. The figures are going to stay the same but we are going to swap out the pumpkin with different items, accessory items like shoes or purses, skulls, bombs, missiles, guns, etc…

 

The three big pieces will be comprised of: A wedding cake tank that will have a skeleton bride riding on top. The cake will be decorated with skulls and weapons and icing. The next piece will be a missile launcher decorated in a similar fashion, and the final piece will be an atom bomb on wheels with an apocalyptic figure riding it kinda like the cowboy at the end of Dr Strangelove.

 

I am seeing the entire thing set up on a catwalk like a fashion show runway. The atom bomb will lead followed by a block of 12 or so of the ghost figures set up like they are marching, followed by the rocket launcher followed by another block of ghosts followed up by the wedding cake.

 

So it will have the look of a fashion show runway crossed with a Communist May Day military parade. The whole set up could be as much as 18 to 20 feet long and appx 3 - 4 feet wide.

 

Bacon’s work definitely has been an influence for me in many ways. As a young kid, I was surrounded by my mother’s collection of art catalogues and coffee-table books. One of my favorites happened to be an old Tate Gallery catalogue on Bacon. Thumbing through the pages, there was something about his paintings that really grabbed me and made a severe impression in my mind… those dark geometric shapes that seemed to go deep into the painting were in such stark contrast to those soft organic piles of barely distinguishable forms of flesh. For the first time I had a sense as to what it was to be moved by art. I realized that not only was art created with emotion but it also conveyed an emotion that was for me, in this case, brilliantly haunting. I knew this was the type of feeling I wanted to come through in my work.

Now that the Dublin Biennial has wrapped up and a majority of my entries for up coming competitions have been sent off… I’ve decided to lock myself away in the studio to concentrate on producing new works. There will be a solo exhibition of my work at the monOrchid gallery in Phoenix toward the end of the year as well as a possible two-person exhibit in Germany in early 2015.