About the Artist

The Fantastical and True Narrative Which creates artwork

I have been painting and drawing professionally while also having a number of different career tracks. I started painting with deliberation and exploration into beauty at 14. Most artists have long exhibition histories, and I could list these, yet in my point of view, having had many different career tracks, including for example, working in Buffalo as a stevedore hauling 450 pound sides of beef and  pork  from the slaughterhouse to freezer trucks using a 3 foot long steel meat hook on my shoulders (I was 6 ft, 5 inches tall and lean and brawny), then much later casting gold jewelry in Queens, NYC, and much later owning and operating an artgallery named Fauve in Amherst, MA. and later working for The McCrory Corporation as an assistant art curator at the time of their donation of the Constructivist Abstraction Wing to MOMA in NYC, and even later I taught drawing at college,

The art which an artist creates is more important and relevant than how many times, where, and when an artist has shown the artworks. In other words, if an artist has never shown their work, and no one has reviewed it, does t exist and stand on its own merit. YES.

So, my bio is a work of art. It is a collection of poetic sketches here and there, a few vignettes which may say more about the artwork than me, and that is all that matters. If I actually wrote down my bio, you might weep, laugh, be astonished and not believe it anyway. Yet my biographical facts remain the facts that fulfill the fantastical narrative. All facts are true yet how could these facts lead to so many rich and creative interconnections later in my life? Facts  like growing up on the edge of Lake Erie in Western New York , in the small city of Lackawanna (an Iroquois word that means peaceful waters), in the 1950's and 1960's at the height of America's steel manufacturing boom, with gigantic 200 foot high Blast Oxygen Furnaces lighting up the seashore day and night between Canada and the USA, spewing out toxic effluents upon the surrounding towns and cities (all before the EPA was born) creating the epitome of the visions of fire, tongues of golden flame streaming to the stars as the massive cauldrons poured ligiid tensor steel into molds of giant ingots to be stamped all day, every day, 24/7, the sound of crashing thundering machinery smashing, smoothing, stamping that steel into forms and shapes to rebuild a hungry for progress and technology world out there. I sat in the shadowy fires of those Bethlehem Steel Company plants, all my relatives worked there, and I painted canvases the size of the walls of my attic bedroom of demented violence, fury ad anger, trying to deflect and reflect the magic and mystery of what I was living through at 14. I had an opportunity to exhibit these wild abstract dynamic huge canvases made from old bedsheets and furniture crate wood in an ad hoc art gallery on Main Street in downtown Buffalo where artists were taking over old department stores left abandoned after the deflation hit the regional economy in 1969. 

Yet I have exhibited many times in different cities, sometimes in similar ad hoc artist run exhibition spaces. However, I am pleased with having been in the stable of artists with Sabastiano DePagan in the most notable DePagan Galleries on %7th St, in NYC in 1987. Art is the reason I awaken every day, not because I am so dedicated, but it is my breath, my energy, my self. All other things I have done were pieces of art, from jobs, marriages, children, friends and all.

But you are here to experience something creative, and I am very pleased to share these works with you. We each share a spark, a movement in our soul, a need to find something to rouse our being, hopefully something that keeps calling us, making us want to look at it again and again, and possibly take a creative work home and never let it out of our sight. That's what I create. I adore each of these works, especially my abstract pieces, for their independence, their inner life force.

As an example of a famous creator who has left off attempting to write a rational biography, I once spoke with the author of 'The Painted Bird", Jerzy Koszinsky, and he told me that although this amazing work was fiction, it was his true autobiography, with some minor details shifted about. If you have read 'fantastic fiction; and are a fan, then you know that whatever we say of ourselves and try to say it is a biography, so be it, and still it is  is a fantastic fiction. The director John Houston told me, in his autobiography, that he himself cannot believe he did and said everything that he did and said, because it is all irrational, unplanned, and too impossible. Yet there it is. He marvels at life and its impossible interconnections which in retrospect will appear as fantastic fiction. His movie work is astonishing. The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown.

Be astonishing, so that when you look back to write your bio, you may be astonished and not believe you did what you did and said what you said, to amazing people in amazing situations.

I am married to an astonishingly beautiful human being who I am certain possesses Elvish blood heritage, I have two fabulous adult sons, and one delightful and otherworldly mysteriously fine grand daughter. I have numerous college degrees, one PhD in psychology, and I am proud of my BFA from SVA in NYC. I have worked in PR for Mayor E Koch in NYC to improve the status of the community of the disabled folks in the tri=state area, working with a leader in the Deaf Community at that time, Ellen Roth, to create the first NYC NBC network closed captioning system to broadcast television for over 500,000 deaf people in the region. I have worked in the Defense Department as a graphic artist preparing military readiness documents and presentations to Langley, Virginia and the White House in Washington D.C. But I am and have always been a free spirit held down by the hands and minds of the negative attitudes of others, until, here and there, I broke free and flew on the wings of my artwork.

All of the fantastic, forlorn, violent, beautiful, blissful, sweet and delightful life that I am lives in these Pretty Serious Abstractions.

Love, assist all, trust few.