From The Beginning

As far back as I can remember I have always had an interest in art. As a child I was always drawing and coloring. I could go into my own world and be happy and safe. It was a protective cocoon. Childhood was not an especially happy time for me. My mother was verbally, emotionally, and psychologically abusive to me. She really didn’t know any better since this was the way that she was brought up. Add to this the fact that in the 1950’s I went to Catholic parochial school through fourth grade and you have the perfect mix for a psychotic or an artist.

All through school art was my best subject probably because it was my identity. Up until high school it was all the normal stuff that you would get in most any school. In high school I could finally take real art classes. This meant all the basics like form and composition, design, learning how to render, and even a smattering of color theory. Later, when I first started college, it seemed like more of the same. I spent a year at a community college. This was a pretty good experience. The most important thing that I learned was that I didn’t want to go to a traditional 4-year state college. I wanted to go to an art school. In order to achieve this, I quit school for a year and worked 2 jobs (one full time and one part time) in order to get the money to go back to school.

I went to the San Francisco Art Institute since the major emphasis of the school was fine arts not that commercial stuff that could actually earn you a living. This was back in the late 1960’s and there was an incredible energy in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Art Institute had a reputation for being very avant-garde and experimental.


Like any other beginning student I started off somewhat conservative, trying to show that I did have certain basic skills. I started off doing paintings that were somewhat surrealistic but quickly let my environment change me as I experienced this new art scene. I was also pretty eager to show my instructors that I was not just the average, run of the mill, student. In the 60’s and 70’s the art scene in NY was dominated by large abstract color field paintings. As a young student I wanted to emulate the modern day masters. I wanted to be an urban painter on the cutting edge of the art scene so I started to experiment. I was going to make art for the sake of art.

San Francisco in the late 60’s was a pretty vibrant place. It was the new center of rock music and the counter culture was growing by the day. On the weekends free concerts were the norm in Golden Gate Park. Experimental theater and Alan Ginsberg doing poetry readings at the City Lights bookstore. There was student unrest at SF State and Cal Berkeley. The time was ripe for change. The art scene in SF had gained national notoriety with the New Figure movement headed by Richard Dibenkorne, Elmer Bischof, and David Parks. The ceramic artist and sculptor, Peter Volkous, gave new direction to an old craft. Sound was being used to create sculptures that could not be seen but heard and felt. Art and technology were partnering up.

California has always been on the cutting edge of technology and this carried over to the arts. The instructor that taught me how to use airbrushes and spray guns learned his craft doing custom paint jobs on cars and motorcycles as a low-rider in the 50’s. He also taught me about automotive lacquers and synthetic paints. Another instructor was using epoxy paint on surfaces built up dimensionally with strips of aluminum and fiberglass. It was very easy to be influenced by all of this.


Eventually a core idea took root in my mind and working abstractly seemed to be the logical direction to head. This early direction is still the basis for my artist statement. I wanted to create large fields of color, of what appeared to be a single color but was made up of many different colors and shades. I wanted to create paintings that seemed simple on the surface but really had a complicated understructure. Even back then color was the most important element for me. To help the color become more intense, more vibrant I would use industrial materials and techniques. In some cases I would use a dark, almost black ground and then spatter bright intense colors over it, the dark intensifying the bright. Other times I would lay down a base coat of gold or silver metallic paint and use transparent glazes of lacquers over it in a spattered effect so that the ground and the top coats would both show. These paintings were created in a very physical way like the abstract action painters of the late 50’s. The act of painting was almost like a dance, as I would move around the painting lying on the studio floor.

These paintings are all from 1971 and part of my final student portfolio. They all measure 96” X 96” and are done on plywood. The paint is a mixture of acrylics, lacquers, synthetics and metal powders. I apologize for the quality of the images. The slides are old and have not been well cared for and my slide scanner doesn’t work so I had to improvise. Hopefully, they still show the general idea.