Many critics and commentators have tried to categorize your work over the years. Have you felt satisfied with those attempts and do you feel as though the collective body of your work composes a unified theme or purpose so as to make such attempts worthwhile and/or intelligible?

How can you place in a particular category that which has to stand by itself. I have seldom consciously followed the mode of the day. I have always tried to discover who I am, what I feel, what is a meaningful goal to pursue. I have seldom been a joiner in anything.

Organized religion? I belong to none but have experienced several. I am a very spiritual person, often drawn to the mystical. Getting behind the surface of things and ideas and translating them into two- and three-dimensional forms is the "category" of my art, although it may be a category of one.

Defining myself through others or as part of a "group" or "movement" is a relative evaluation of self; it becomes who We are, not nevessarily who I am. What I see, read, feel, and experience is who I am. There has always been constancy in this pursuit, although the results in my art over the last 50-plus years have certainly shown detours in approach and material. Through change and experimentation I have expanded the personal horizons, but the core of a Nature and Spirit connection continues to resurface along the way. I find truth in that there is a connection to and with all things. Yet it is by willfully separating from this that different faces and points of view can and do emerge.

In the very early part of your career your work consisted mostly of paintings but you then made a break from that medium and become almost exclusively a sculptor. What inspired you to make that transition?

The transition from painting to sculpture was sudden, in retrospect dramatic. A colleague, Jim Wines, had seen my figurative paintings in Rome and boldly announced to me that I was a sculptor. He saw in my figures a strong 3-dimensional plastic quality. At that moment it seemed quite absurd.

Some time later while visiting in his studio he handed me some clay and insisted I try my hand at sculpture. Jim and I had often gone to the Rome Zoo to draw the animals. My first sculpture was a rhinocerous.

Just as I knew when entering the Art Students' League in NYC that first school day in 1947 that I was indeed in the right place, I here knew that a three-dimensional art form was right for me. A sudden love-affair-marriage; all in one day. I did not make another painting until 25 years later.

You left Italty in 1976. What were the features of the general political climate in Italty at that time? How do you feel your role as an artist, and an American artist in particular, affected your position in that climate?

Italy in the 1970's was in a state of political upheaval which was at times frightening. This included incessant strikes, terrorist bombings, burning of huge quantities of mail, a kind of war between the political far left and right.

By 1976 it appeared to be quite certain the Communists would win the election and take control of the government. At this time I, as well as many other Americans, returned to the U.S.

I have always been a political activist. My oppisition to Fascism and Communism as well as being an American resident in a foreign country (albeit one I loved and lived in for 19 years) would have made me an easy target. Politically I have always been somewhat left-leaning and strongly opposed to any right-wing philosophy.