My Life As An Artist

It's somehow important for me to mention that I was raised in Manhattan. I didn't have any particular art training in my various schools but I did take classes and my first direction in the art world was geared towards crafts, which then and now is for some reason not considered to be fine art. I got my undergraduate degree at the Cleveland Institute of Art, in Ohio and my major was enameling. It seemed like a good idea at the time. After college I moved back to NYC for a time and while I was there had the good fortune to show my work at the only all enamels gallery in the city, called Spring Street Enamels. I sold work there, also helped to hang shows, give and take classes and bask in the greatness of the owner, Joan Itzcovitz.

Eventually I moved onto a more formal job as a jeweler and after around five years of all work and no play, to say nothing of little time for my own art, I moved to Cranston, RI. I truly thought I would only stay a year, just to get a lot of work done, meet some new people, find myself a little. That was in 1986. I am still here, in Cranston.

I stayed with enamels until I realized that I was trying very hard to make them look like drawings. Eventually the craft got in the way of the image I was after, so with much melancholy I put away my kiln and worked more with pen and ink. I’d always like using a mechanical drawing pen for everything from writing to sketches to complete drawings, but when I decided that was my medium I treated the work more seriously and for many years struggled to figure out what sort of drawings I wanted to do.

Eventually I was able to come up with two distinct bodies of work that satisfy my love of narrative combined with text, and my admiration of purely abstract work that while simple in form is not simple. In both genres I like my work to show my hand and I like my work to illustrate a certain density of page, so that even if all there is, is line, there will be many of them and the final image with be as complete an exploration of line I can achieve.

Between these two sorts of imagery I've found that I haven't run out of ideas nor had any problem with blank page syndrome in many years. My opus of line/imagery/text was my Diary Project, which combined every sort of style I like into a single seventy-two part artwork. It took me around four years to complete, from start to finish, and has been shown in Providence and in Massachusetts at the DeCordova Museum. I'm working on making it into a book and it will be exhibited again in Providence and possibly at a university in Mass.

I continue to make abstract drawings using primarily ink and exhibit these at galleries in Boston and New York.

I have stayed in Rhode Island and will always have a love/hate relationship with this state. I love my family and my friends. I think this place allows me to find time to work and to easily meet supportive curators and gallerists who have helped me refine, aspire, and exhibit.

I don't like that this is a town that thinks it's a city. I don't like the high rents, short-sighted and criminal politicians (I have always liked our senators), right wing radio nuts, uneven and often sub par public schools, a lack of buyers who support contemporary art. I hate the weather. Maybe that would be the same anywhere. Not the weather part, but the rest of it.

At any rate, I am here and here to stay for the foreseeable future.