EARLIEST SURVIVING ART WORK
This drawing was found among the papers my father left at his passing. This makes him my first collector. I vividly remember spending hours drawing row upon row of women in strapless dresses with big skirts on any paper I could find. I then went back and decorated each dress differently. This was most likely drawn around the time I started kindergarten at age four years, 9 months.
I started the drawing on the front of the envelope but made a mistake by starting a second female figure.
So I crossed out everything and went to work on the back.
UNDERGRADUATE ART WORK
This 1964 painting is the earliest example of my interest in using plants to embody painterly ideas.
It also contains a narrative idea, since I consider it a portrait of my then-recently-deceased paternal Grandmother who sunbathed in her backyard while sitting on this now derelict wooden chair
GRADUATE STUDENT WORK -- IN SEARCH OF MY PAINTERLY SOUL
YEAR ONE -- hard edge Mondrian. My personal Ying.
YEAR TWO --amorphous shapes. My personal Yang
Color images are from slides.
Better quality images to come.
1995 I FINALLY FIND MY WAY
Seven Palms
42” x 61” 1995
A move to Florida brought me back to painting. I had set down my brush in late1972 at the end of my graduate studies in upstate New York to dive into a heady Manhattan life. By 1993, after a stint in Connecticut, I was settled into a new job and a house with an in-ground pool on Florida's Space Coast,
The active local art scene inspired me to return to painting: portraits, narratives, animals, commissions. Feeling my way, image by image, like walking through a thick forest.
In 1995, while working on a photographic image from a visually rich, neglected, palm hammock on the grounds of a local college, in a distinct instant, I saw my way. I realized I could express all my painterly ideas -- resolve my graduate school aesthetic Ying and Yang -- in painting tropical plants interacting with light.