I began painting at a time in my life that I needed a miracle. I was floundering, dropped out of college, my father was pretty sick, and I was just pretty lost and miserable. I did not know what to do. I quit the University Of Pennsylvania because I was in over my head, and I didn’t really give a shit anymore after getting all D’s even though I studied as hard as I ever did in my life. I could not hack it there. It was my first time away from home, and I was even more lost when I found myself in Philadelphia. So I came home to be near my father, mother, sister Francine and brother Lou, who was a teacher in Auburn Prison, the home of the world’s first electric chair. You see, my family was and is my entire life, that is the reason I live and breath. I didn’t care about football, studies, money, fame or fortune. I just needed to be near the people I love. I guess that is why I have stayed in the family home all these years, even though everyone I cherish or cherished is either gone away or died. The memories and the energy and the vibration, the space and reality is still here even though it is just me and Calpurnia, a cat that I picked up at the golf course and brought to live here. This house is a special place, and only special beings can live here and comprehend what it is that makes this house special, what it is that is here. I never do mind being alone here, because, quite honestly and sincerely, I am never alone when I am here. I never want to leave here, not even to go to work. this house is my haven, my heaven, my safe place fro the rest of the world. It is filled with a healing energy, an energy that runs through you and makes you strong and healthy, in many many ways.

At any rate, after I left Penn. I came home and enrolled at a local college. During that summer, a friend who I went to high school with invited me over to his house and got me interested in painting. I took an immediate liking and kinship to the process, and found that the paint just seemed to form images that related directly to what I was seeing, in an intuitive sort of way. I painted from them on, and took a few art courses at the local college. The art courses were rudimentary and meant nothing to me, so i continued to explore the process of putting paint on canvas on my own terms.

I moved to Washington DC in the spring of 1972, a few months after my father died. I had a job in the ITT Continental Baking bread making factory up on Georgia Avenue. My brother was the personnel manager, and told me he could get me a job on the loading dock making about $240 a week. Needless to say I was directionless after I dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania, and I think everyone here at home was kind of concerned and could smell trouble a brewin’. I got in with a bad crowd at the college, and just needed to get a fresh perspective, after all those years of stardom on a local level, and living up to everyone else’s expectations. I took an old suitcase, and a bag of paints and brushes,and boarded a buss for DC. I bought some canvases at an art store around the corner from my apartment on 1302 I Steet, just down the block from the Grayhound Bus station, and a few blocks from Georgia Avenue, where I boarded a city bus every afternoon for my journey to the bread factory. It was good work, and I did some good paintings.

I was there a few months when my brother told me he met this guy named Harithas who was the director of the Everson Museum in Syracuse. Harithas was a fireball of a guy who loved to stir things up, and had something art-wise going with the inmates in the prison. My brother showed Harithas a few of my paintings, and the guy said he wanted to meet me and talk to me. So I came home, met with him, and right there in the living room couch he told me that he wanted me to do an art show,  one-man show of large figure paintings at the Everson in 1974. So I said yes, I could do that, even though I never did a figure painting in my entire life. So I moved home and went to work in the back porch addition that my father built on to the house so many years before, the back porch that I called and still call my studio.

I took a job at our church and school on the next block where I did my childhood, and where Ma was employed as the secretary. I did odd jobs like painting the school rooms and old sacristy upstairs to pay for paints, brushes, canvas, and to help out a little around the house.

I began painting at a feverish pace, almost night and day for two straight years, I would paint all day, catch a few hours sleep after supper on the couch in front of the television, then go back into the studio and work until four or five in the morning. My family financed the venture whenever I needed any paints of canvas or brushes; we even went on a trip to Spain, where we visited many cultural cathedrals and I came home with a roll of Spanish canvas, which the airlines crushed in the middle, many hand made Spanish brushes, some pure ground paints from the localities that we visited. It was a great time.

Painting was second nature to me, like athletics was when I was a little kid. There was no stopping ground of indecision caused by the lack of commitment of adulthood. My decisions were pure and instantaneous, and came directly from a pure and open heart, and a direct connection to the collective unconscious, the breeding ground for intuition, innovation, and inspiration. Like athletics, I reveled in the experience of making art, loved the exhilaration, the sense of discovery, the newness of being every time I began to work again. It was as if I was filled with a renewed spirit, a river of energy. I was touching something deep and powerful that was touching me back, There were no negativities, only the positive. I was involved at every level, all cylinders were pumping at full acceleration.

What I came to discover after a while was that I was discovering a way to live that was healthy and suited to what I wanted to do. I was stripping away layers and layers of consciousness, and peeling away the many psychic, spiritual, and scars of the soul that one manages to accumulate over the course of a lifetime or many lifetimes. I was given a chance and method to lay waste to the excess baggage that I had accumulated over the years of living, in this live or over many lifetimes. I was making visible that matter that lies beyond our everyday existence and awareness. I was making a visual record of the collective unconscious, a record that would be shown in public. I was doing something worthwhile, something that might help someone else who saw and experienced the work to understand a little about themselves, the way I was learning about myself. I found I did not need alcohol or drugs, even though my experience with both was not very extensive up until that point. I was learning to survive by using the tools that I was given.

I painted over two years without a respite, and hung my show proudly with the help of the curator of the Everson. Harithas had left for Houston, Texas. My show was in August of 1974. There was no reception, although I was rather surprised that the television stations demanded to interview me in the gallery, and take pictures of the work that were later shown on television. It was not until the pictures were hung and the show opened that I realized what an emotional and spiritual toll I had paid by unleashing that much psychic and spiritual energy, and by letting it be replaced by the pure spirit and newness of the unconscious. There was a small gathering at a friends house the evening the show opened, and I had a total emotional breakdown and started crying and could not stop. It was like the floodgates had opened and I was powerless to stop the flow. I guess the party broke up early, and the next thing I remember my sister was driving me home. We were going up the hill by Community General Hospital, taking the “back way home” as we used to call it. I finally stopped crying and came to my senses and saw the the sun was shining toward sunset.

As always, the experience was spoiled somewhat by other people. Other artists were extremely jealous, and all I heard from the artistic community was negativity and criticism. It really bothered me. I would walk proudly into a room or art opening or party and immediately be targeted by harsh invective, almost to the point of jealous rage, by any other artists who were present in the room. I had in my own mind given this venture all I had and done nothing wrong, yet the only words I heard from “peers” were discouraging. I even heard a couple friends, Bill Roberts and Jack White, talking one time about the negative aspects of what I was doing.

The only thing I was guilty of doing was stripping myself, my soul, naked to the bone, of exposing my most inner being for the world to see. There were so many things I did not understand, such as why this was a bad thing. It bothered me then, and bothers me a little now, so many years later.

I have continued to work at my art. I have long since abandoned the oil paints and acrylic paints (for health reasons) and have adapted my creative process and style to the digital world. The electric is a direct route to the unconscious, without the cumbersome intervention of physicality. My process adapted itself immediately the the digital, electric, abstract world of the computer. The few software programs I have found that are advanced enough to fill me creative needs have yielded some astounding results. I can even work on my art wherever and whenever I want to, without having to worry about carrying around all the cumbersome equipment used in physical mediums. What is better is that digital, computer generated work is so much more adaptable to my process. I can do in ten minutes what used to take me ten weeks or ten months. The electric impulse is a direct route to the unconscious. The human who uses it ( the artist) just has to learn to recognize the signposts along the way, and know where to move the cursor, and begin and end an image.

I even tried to give up making art, because I was bitter about all the negativity that came from other people. I am just a human being and need a little approval and positive feedback, just like everyone else. But quitting proved to be a sort lived experiment. It only took a little while for my body to start to rebel on my, and for that feeling that I had to work again to come back. I could almost feel a foreign entity inside me, churning and struggling to get out. There was this enormous tension, this energy that was building inside me that needed to be set free. So I opened the computer one day, and went back to work, and have been working and building on the process ever since.

I make images, write, and play the guitar (badly), and make anti-music, because I have to make images, write and make sounds. The process is necessary to my survival, to my very existence. The end result, the work, still comes from that very place that fosters very spark and energy that put us all here in the first place, and the spark and energy that will take us back to where we came from. It is nothing special. I was fortunate enough to have been able to experience some things first hand, and fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to make these things real, tangible, and visible. I was also fortunate enough to have been given the will, spirit, soul, and psyche to handle the experience, to handle and make use of the gift that was bestowed upon me.

Here and now, I give back to all the naysayers and negative beings all their naysaying and negativity. I stretch and reach via the impulse electric into all your beings and minds, and put back into you the weight that I have carried around with me all these years. If you are feeling a little uncomfortable for a while, tough shit! You deserve it! I have survived and will survive, and what is more important, my images, ideas, and sounds will also survive, and the process that makes the real will survive, and be given the opportunity to get out there, to make people understand a little about their real self, and to make life here on earth a little better.

Very First Painting

Survival Through

Art