BIO - DAN KURLAND

I am self-trained. My only “formal” study came from studying the tool marks on Michelangelo’s unfinished works in Italy.

I began carving as an avocation in the mid-1960’s while editor-in-chief at a New York publishing house. I did not sculpt full time until the mid-1980’s when I moved to Austin, Texas. There I taught stone carving at the Elisabet Ney Sculpture Conservatory and exhibited in numerous shows and galleries in the Austin-Dallas-Houston-San Antonio area. I worked mostly in limestone and marble “the old-fashioned way” -- almost exclusively with hammer and chisel.

I continued to carve off and on in the interim years, and after, during careers as a machinist in SOHO New York, middle school math/science teacher on the Hopi Indian reservation, high school math teacher in a New York City high school , Assistant to the Chaplain at Johns Hopkins University and Director of the Baltimore Free University, college language arts specialist at various New York area colleges (see criticalreading.com) and as a legislative health care lobbyist in West Virginia – in most instances maintaining some gallery presence. During those years I published in juried academic journals in chemistry, psychology, and college composition.

With my wife’s recent retirement from Florida State University we moved “back home” to Charleston where I can again devote my full attention to carving.