One of my earliest memories is standing on a stool at an old porcelain utility sink in murky fluorescence holding paintbrushes under running water as a pre-schooler at City&Country in Greenwich Village in the late 50s. It took me six decades of wandering to get back to painting, but back to it I got.
I remember filing by the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and the Pieta at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows as a kid and getting the whole big reverent thing, but really being completely unmoved. Then after satisfying the barebones high school art requirement, which involved completely useless, GPA-lowering stuff like drawing an old shoe and a cow skull, I was done with dumb boring art forever. Or so I certainly thought. If you consider Bennington College formal art training, then I did get a few semesters of something that would help jazz up the artbio, though I went there intending to study nutrition, after becoming an Adele Davis fanatic while recuperating from a spinal injury incurred in a boozing blackout my second week at Boston University. (“Wandering” just sounds better than “F-ing up all over the place”.) Somehow painting was the only art I didn’t dip my toe into at Bennington.
Eventually, I hippied my way up to northern Vermont, where I’ve been ever since. The paintings I do now morphed out of funky one-of-a-kind art books I made over the years that started out mostly writing, but then got less and less verbal, more and more image-oriented. Finally, we come to a couple of resume items: Sleeping Bag book won a local art prize. Rug book got displayed in the museum in Brattleboro. But a complete lack of sales stalled production. People wonder about the brown bag paper I paint on. The books were made from “found materials” so grocery bags became the pages in some volumes.
Empty nest = wading all the way in.
