The desire by humans to make a statement is pretty unbelievable. It’s our basic desire, even if we may not be aware of it. If we look back in time, the first human rubbed his hand in some pigment and slammed it against a cave wall, and that was his signature. Today you have idiots tagging themselves by writing their name on anything and everything, or holding their cameras out in front of themselves to photograph themselves.  But some of us try to hone our visual skills a little better than that and to become artists. I, for one, have spent forty-five years trying to hone my skills. I had a great desire to make art . . . and, by God, I worked at it.

As an artist, I am merely reflecting what I see and feel and think about the world. I see it, I reflect on it, and I interpret it in the form of sculpture. My work is of my time, my century, and my culture. What’s really exciting is when viewers of my work recognise what they’re looking at, when they connect with my work. Some people have told me that they can’t look at an airplane now without seeing or thinking about my flying machines.

My machines deal with fantasy and in order to create the fantasy I must take my machines into the street. When I put my sculpture in the Detroit River or on the Salt Flats in Utah, the fantasy becomes complete. That’s when it picks up power. When you see the Bonneville machine glistening on the Salt Flats, the fantasy takes on real force. By placing my sculpture in these settings, I introduced factors that cannot be duplicated in an “art environment” like a museum or gallery. Sometimes my machines become so real that they almost scare me.