In art, the person who constructs the art collaborates with the person who uses the art to form pathways between inner and outer worlds; between the unconscious and the conscious; between the ancestral, the individual and the collective. In illustration, the illustrator/designer provides an artifact that induces a sensation in/for the customer/recipient. Often, art and illustration are mixed together in a single product. I appreciate that this can be confusing.
Francisco Goya is often cited as a transition between an old and a new understanding of art. From prominence as a painter of royal portraits, he shifted focus to ordinary peoples’ experience of war, to the human inner experience and finally to representations of the shape of the unconscious teetering on the brink of pure abstraction.
My 1950s postwar childhood to a degree paralleled Goya’s later shifts of perception in that my environment, the mostly wild hills above Hollywood, was inhabited by artists, refugees and other persons of interest united in a re-examination of the human psyche in the aftermath of tragic and inexplicable events. These individuals became my teachers.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Disclaimer
Although I hold various art and education degrees and endorsements from Western Washington University, Woodring College, Antioch College and others, these were acquired late in life for the purpose of gaining employment in public education. My actual education came from people: parents, siblings, students and fortuitous acquaintances. Similarly, my inclusion in familiar venues such as MoMA has been largely accidental. My actual focus has been on an ever-shifting community of fellow artist/interpreters.
1956-1967
Father: photographer of noir Los Angeles and desert ghost towns
Desert Rats: prospectors turned rock shop owners: environment as art/commentary on human condition: terms such as pseudomorph, layers of deposition, discontinuity, breccia, etc.
John Tortora: landscape painter in Western genre: I was directed to use Mr. Tortora’s painting as a guide while executing my first watercolor. I noted a stronger visceral response if I viewed it as three separate compositions; foreground, midground and background. Consequently, my first painting depicted a cloudy sky.
Mary Frank: living in a house made of salvaged movie sets at the end of a long footpath: Her art, an arrangement of symbols reminiscent of those I experienced in dreams, mirrored the grammar of her workspace and sensibility (mother of my friend Pablo, wife of photographer Robert Frank).
Mother: authority on matters of genre and provenance: deposited me in a Beverly Hills art school Dorothy Royer: art school director, painter, on board of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, art therapist: promoted me as child prodigy; arranging publicity and exhibits: When my parents’ money ran out I was permitted to work off tuition cleaning brushes. As I began to explore various new genres I became more difficult to write about and less useful as a prodigy. I did, however, become useful as a tutor working with difficult/disturbed students of my own age.
Jerry Citrin: middle-school design instructor: construction of images on basis of design principles: introduction to work of Phil McCracken
1967-1972
Philip E. Lewis: letterpress printer, educator: relief printing techniques
Sister Mary Corita (Kent): artist (especially serigraph), teacher, activist: digressions from intended/expected results as emergence of unconscious narratives
Dorothy Cannon: painter, educator: Ash Can School (art-for-life’s-sake): While a teacher at the Cannon workshop I became conversant in myriad media and genres and participated in numerous group shows, occasional solo exhibits and several community mural projects.
Frank Baker: scholar: Australian aboriginal art (also writer, actor, long-time collaborator with director John Ford): A deer trail led me to Frank’s cottage; not accessible by road. He acquainted me with specific traditional links between the unconscious, the environment and culture.
Hal Silverman: art director, instructor: Art Center College of Design: Bauhaus rationales and protocols
Julius Milstein: still-life painter: palette layout and dynamics: base values-to-grays progression
1972-1982
Sly Stone: musician, band leader: development of short musical passages (motif elements) as learning tools and compositional components
Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss: modernist composer, Master of the Queen’s Music: function of short musical passages (motif elements) in awakening unconscious narratives
Mahmoud Baidun: antiquities dealer, patriarch (Jerusalem): generally: identification of counterfeit artifacts; specifically: the artifact as a record of human gestures
Al King: artist, researcher, instructor: Art Center College of Design (also close associate of Gordon Onslow Ford, a member of Breton’s Paris Surrealist Group, the impetus behind the emergence of abstract expressionism and Jackson Pollack’s motion painting): Al King acquainted me with principles of illustration, specific traditional links between the unconscious and the environment in Chinese culture, the comprehensive Munsell Color System and the more practical King Color system. While working and studying with Al King I completed catalogue illustrations of his porcelain research collection, taught at the Cannon Workshop, acted as guest instructor in Los Angeles City Schools and organized numerous pop-up group exhibitions. At this time I began to more seriously concentrate on the crafts revival movement; particularly on developing marbling and ebru techniques.
1982-2021
In this period I produced ebru that was shown in numerous venues including the L.A. County Art Museum, MoMA, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian and the Chicago Art Institute. I served as a board member with Anacortes Youth Arts and as artist-in-residence in the Anacortes School District. In addition, I became a regular teacher in the Anacortes School District, the Seattle School District and others.
Ted Lindberg: curator, critic, writer: relationship of art criticism to art commerce
Max Benjamin: painter: abstraction through development of negative space
Anne McCracken: teacher, letterpress artist: (wife of sculptor Phil McCracken): development of relief images through overprinting of reciprocal images
Guy Anderson: painter: from a group of temperas I was showing at gallery Dei Gratia in La Conner, Anderson selected the sole example of a painting process, deeply intuitive and process-based, to which no one had previously responded. This informed/enabled my decision to continue in this direction.
Currently
I am working with painter/gallery owner Rebecca Meloy and painter/gallery owner Rick Leonard.