ARTIST’S STATEMENT 1-23-19
Ever since I fell in love with drawing in 1963, I felt a
purpose beyond simply creating. In those early, naïve days, I felt I had a
purpose: to help make a better world by providing it with art of a special
sort...a sort with feelings so extreme, it might exorcise the viewer's pain. That
is what made me defy the cruel opposition of my family.
The resultant anger and dissatisfaction with the truths of
life that grew in evidence have always driven my work. We were not wealthy;
though I went to art courses after high school hours and later college classes,
it was my choice not to undergo art school conditioning. A career in art meant
independence.
I forged ahead feverishly. In my work, human emotion, casual
cruelty and their natural byproduct, pain, are ever-present motifs. In a
culture that demands the smothering of truths, I feel I have a mission to
express, to speak to others whose needs and feelings are not being addressed in
life as well as art; to lash open the curtain to expose the underrepresented beauty
of America’s
shabby.
Joy is another extremity. I parody the excesses of popular culture. The
female figures are a culmination of art’s ideals through art history to the
voluptuosity of vintage Hollywood,
commercial art and the burlesque stage. I depict the “common man’s”wish
fulfillments with sensuality swelled to bursting, expressed in rich impasto or
heavy slathers of black. I want color you can eat, like rich, frothy bread. In
a sole work, I try to encourage the viewer to walk into the frame. I want a
roomful of them to swallow the spectator. Inspired by Renaissance drawing, I put
serious thought into keeping my figures and backgrounds full bodied and full of
motion, to never do anything 'easily', to always twist the figures and
perspectives into going that 'extra mile'. I am at heart an American cartoonist and have a difficulty with segregating my art as ‘African American’. I consider my art to be international; Asian brush paintings, Expressionism, Pop Art; it is better to ask what I am not influenced by. My inspirations span time and globe.
My interest is rarely in
recapturing or approximating reality, but in creating new ideas and forms and
in giving them their own unique life.
***
BIO 1-23-19
Left home at seventeen, ekeing out what some would call a semi-living at my crafts while enjoying a lovely semi-homeless existence on Manhattan's waterfront. Finally landed in a Brooklyn brownstone where I spent seven waterbuggy years.
Did everything I could, I wasn't particular. Wrote and drew comic books and comic strips for magazines and small newspapers, illustrated, designed record covers, posters, candy and T-shirts, and exhibited paintings and drawings, the major gallery being Psychedelic Solution in Manhattan. Spent the 1980's on the outskirts of the "radical art scene" of Greenwich Village. A challenging time, if not always a happy one.
Labor on Ninja Turtles comics allowed me to get up a grubstake to move to the West Coast in 1991, lured by prospects of a more healthful existence. There followed a riot and a few earthquakes while working in animation as a designer, animator, and debuting as a director thanks to my good friend Felix the Cat and yes, I did a spot of work for Disney). My work in the print media continued until that market petered out thanks to computers and The New Dark Ages.
To retain my sanity (HA), I work on a stream of independent projects, which have included a first novel, independent animation, and the painting.
Became a Bloomington resident in June of 2018.
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