Growing up on a family farm, Max was a maker, fixer and problem solver. His first college art course was in 1953. The first influences, that he remembers, were artists from the Bauhaus school and Picasso. As a graduate student, in the 1960s, he explored abstract expressionism, surrealism, minimalism, pop art, design, ceramics and jewelry. Integrity, simplicity, line and space are the things that seem, to him, to be most important.