I’ve been deeply involved with art my whole life. My earliest sort of art experience is from kindergarten playing with clay. I have no idea what sort of blob I was making but the boy next to me had made a long blob and was waving it around saying “rokkettamazz”. At least that’s what it sounded like to me at the time, but which I realized many years later was “rocket to Mars.” I probably had no idea either what Mars was, but did come to realize that he had made something that represented something else. That lump of clay was a talisman with the power to transport that boys imagination. Years later, living in Africa, I read in the local paper about a lawsuit involving a woman and her aunt, both self-proclaimed witches. The woman was suing her aunt because she claimed that, as they were flying on their aircraft, the aunt pushed her niece out of the aircraft causing her to fall on a house breaking her arm. The aircraft was a matchbook. Seemingly inanimate objects and images can be powerful.

 

I drew and painted throughout my youth. I had some guidance from art class teachers. I took a ceramics class at the County Center and made a small creamer that the teacher claimed I couldn’t have made at 9 years old but I did. In high school I took a painting class in a small art school and was proud that the teacher claimed I was the best student in the school. I got occasional help from my father’s friend, Mr. Mastro a photo retoucher by vocation and accomplished water colorist by avocation. I tried out to be an illustrator for the high school newspaper, but the student in charge turned me down because I didn’t draw what he called caricatures with the accent on the ric. I did manage to do the cover of the literary magazine and some illustrations senior year.

 

College was the automatic path. I majored in fine art- not a great choice in the small liberal arts school I went to, did abysmally in the academics and was asked to leave and “reconsider” after two years. I did however enjoy and benefit from the studio instructor, James Penney who was fairly successful and brought a marvelous quirkiness to class that really affected me.

 

The next step was The School of Visual Arts in New York. I was ecstatic. It was the first time I’d felt so much enthusiasm for school. Six hours of classes every day including a six hour drawing class on Friday was just wonderful. I often stayed late working on projects and definitely tortured my roomate with the mess at the little apartment we shared. At that time it seemed that every young and up and coming artist would spend some time teaching at SVA. Robert Mangold, Steve Gianakos, Joseph Raphael, Mel Bochner, Richard van Buren, Raymond Handler. All teachers of mine. The school was in a former dental colllege building and had an operating theater where I had an anatomy class with Burne Hogarth, the illustrator of “Tarzan” comic strips. He would be down there on the stage drawing all these bulging muscles on a huge newsprint pad with blue and sanguine chalk. It was wonderful theater. It was the late sixties and in the East Village everything happening. It was exciting and l produced a lot. Lots of experiments and some “keepers”.

 

The New York art world was vibrant and positive in the late 60’s and 70’s. The money was always there, but seemed to be less important than the spirit of experimentation and diversity. Shows included a Robert Kushner fashion show at Holly Solomon in Soho where purple pencils imprinted with “That Kushner Look” were handed out prior to the show- in which the models gradually appeared with less and less on until there was nothing more to remove- to 57th Street where Francis Bacon was showing images of twisted figures in heavy gold frames, paintings selling for many thousands of dollars. The Hairy Who, older abstract expessionists, de Kooning, Noland, Poons, Katz, Red Grooms, Oldenburg, Stella, Lucian Freud, Richard van Buren, Nam Jun Paik. And music and dance were innovating with people like John Cage, Philip Glass, Merce Cunningham, Lamonte Young and an influx of Indian musicians active at the same time as Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, Motown and on and on. The variety was dazzling and one felt anything was possible. I started working for George Sugarman at that time too and ended up meeting many of the big and smaller names active then.

 

I kept working for Sugarman for many years, but became rather dismayed with the sense of rivalry and dysfunction I saw for which the art world is both condemned and celebrated depending on your point of view. And I was not a New Yorker at heart. The oldest of seven siblings who grew up in the suburbs spending a lot of time in a wooded environment, and having endured a number of burglaries and car thefts in the city, my new wife and I moved to the nearby suburbs, bought a house, and raised two kids. Going back to the roots, really. I left the art world in large part, but not art.

 

But the compulsion to create was not left in a loft in Manhattan or Brooklyn. It’s a personality trait that continues to propel one to produce objects with the power to represent ideas, emotions. Talismans. Amulets. Tikis. The Declaration of Independence can be read as a PDF of course, but as a physical document hand written on parchment it means much more than the words alone. So too with the materials of fine art. A lump of clay can take one on an interplanetary voyage of discovery.

 

And so the journey continues.