While at UC Davis between 1968 and 1972 I spent as much time as possible working among such ceramic sculptors as Bob Arneson, Marilyn Levine, David Gilhooly, Richard Notkin, and others. The venue was temporary building nine (TB-9) on the UC Davis campus. The environment within TB-9 was convivial and supportive and lots of great sculpture was done every day without ceremony. But the world outside was a different and worrisome place. The war in Vietnam, the draft and Watergate among other events cast a pall over hopes and expectations for the future. As a result much of the work from that time conveyed a mixed sense of grim nihilism and absurdist denial – wonderfully undergirded by a resolute sense of humor. Not surprisingly my work today comes largely from a similarly bleak but insistently “happy” synthesis of dark, but often laughable and absurd, takes on the world.