My Long History with Light

When I was in college in the early 1960s, my buddies majored in law, economics, medicine, and accounting. I started out in pre-med and after low grades in organic chemistry, I changed my major to my “first love”—art. I wanted to create, to be an artist—first it was painting, then it became ceramic sculpture.

After leaving university, I became a professional ceramicist in Dallas. In the mid 1960s, at age 23, I owned “The Pot Shop” where I sold my pottery and ceramic sculpture. After a few years in business, I was asked to design and make ceramic light fixtures for an apartment complex. I quickly built a large commercial light fixture manufacturing company – Stoneware Products. In the early 1970s, it soon became a large business that was no longer creatively challenging for me. I sold the company and went back to graduate school on a full scholarship for an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) and concurrently attended an exciting new school for experimental art and technology.

I then decided I wanted to make ceramic sculptures that changed color. Having already mastered earthenware, stoneware, and Raku ware, I wanted a greater challenge. With help from scientists, I developed rare earth (e.g., uranium, samarium, neodymium, oxides) glazes that changed color. The sculpture had a daylight color displayed inside an acrylic plastic box that changed the fluorescent color with the alternating flashing of an ultraviolet light inside the box. From a daylight color to a glow-in-the-dark color.

Working with light became my daily endeavor in 1972. My romance with light was just beginning.

I had a studio making the color changing ceramic sculptures at the University of Dallas while I also attended the technology focused Northwood Institute Art School. One day in my studio, I picked up a test tile that had a glow in the dark phosphorescent glaze on it. In the dark it glowed everywhere except where my thumb had been grasping it. The shadow of my thumb remained on the tile. Wow! I could make a wall of ceramic tiles and if you were to cast a light on someone standing against the wall, they could walk away from their own shadow.

Then the thought came to me, why not just paint the wall? Use paint. I started making “shadow retaining” art. I was now into the “art and technology” art movement of the 1970s. I never made another ceramic piece again.

(Incidentally, The Negative Shadow Retainer, my shadow-retaining artwork on an aluminum panel, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1973. My original idea is now commonplace in many Natural History Museums worldwide.)

Also in 1973, I won the top prize in the Dallas Museum’s Texas Competitive Art Exhibition. Over 1200 artists submitted their work. My artwork then was projecting the insides of light bulbs with exotic filaments onto the walls of buildings, even on passing clouds. To me, seeing what one normally cannot see was a metaphor for acknowledging the unknown. Seeing an unknown reality. The Juror was Samuel Wagstaff, a famous NY art collector, partner of Robert Mapplethorpe and benefactor of poet/punk rocker Patti Smith. It was at this time that I had to learn photography to economically document my artwork.

And what is photography? Light stopped in time. I started making photograms, which are photo images made without a camera or film. I made my own flashlights with special filters to paint with colored light in the dark onto photo paper which I then developed into prints. I made images on Cibachrome, a positive photo paper. The manufacturer of that paper, Ciba (now Ilford), collected my work and exhibited it at the prestigious Photokina Exhibitions in Europe in the late 1970s.

In the early 1980s, I discovered neon—collaborating with a famous sculptor as an assistant. I had a girlfriend who requested I make her a neon-shaped heart. Thinking it would be too bright, I told her I would make one with a dimmer. Discovering there was no such thing as a neon dimmer, I spent months researching that technology and built my own dimmer for that neon heart. That process, learning electronics, evolved into me becoming an inventor of the first UL listed neon dimmer in the USA. This dimmer brought outdoor neon signs indoors with neon brightness down to candlelight. Now neon designs could be used for indoor decoration, signage, and commercial low-cost lighting. A new market for graphics opened up as neon became usable indoors in bars and restaurants.

Now I started using neon to make indoor neon sculpture. Dimming the artwork, it could be endless mixed colors [isn’t clear what you mean here – reword]. The design theme were lines inspired by the I Ching, the 3000-year-old Chinese Book of Changes. That artwork was a metaphor. The observer used the dimmers to create a color changing sculpture. You created your own reality. Never automated.

In the early 1990s, I had a failed business venture in Europe. I had already successfully introduced neon “open” signs throughout the USA, made by the world’s largest producer of beer signs—Everbright in California. My new idea was to introduce ready-made signs in Europe, where they were still making expensive handmade neon signs. My two-year investment in European distribution did not work because the American company couldn’t supply the 220-volt transformers being used in Europe.

This episode led me to suffer from “New Age Guilt.” Knowing I created my own reality, I became distraught over the economic loss and failure of the project. Why had I sabotaged myself?

A friend suggested I use a pendulum to ask for advice from my subconscious and bypass my chattering ego to find answers. My first pendulum was a rock on a piece of thread. I read a book on how to use the pendulum. The image of the Chevreul pendulum chart in that book stuck. Chevreul was a French pioneer who in 1833 published how the pendulum worked through an ideomotor action.

Within a few weeks, I learned how to use the pendulum. One morning in the shower, I visualized the Chevreul pendulum chart on a glass tile. Using the technology I had invented for one of my sign businesses, I started making glass table-top charts and pendulum kits. Somewhat ironically, the divination device I used to ask for advice on how to continue making my living, became what I did to make a living in 1994.

I continued to manufacture pendulums and divination products for 29 years.

Guided by my intuition and seeded by the ongoing relationship I have with my “Council of Light” spirit connection, eventually I came to realize that my whole life has been a step-by-step learning process leading me to bring “The Light Trigger” into our physical reality. By learning about light at a young age and later the process of pendulum divination, the Council of Light has given me the tools to make The Light Trigger™ and fulfill my purpose in this lifetime. Pendulum divination is the tool I use to reveal each person’s unique color frequency.