I am studio- trained artist from Pennsylvania with a University of Iowa MA 1966, in Studio Art, a minor in Art History with concentrated work in early Italian art from Wallace Tomasini and with an MFA in drawing , and sculpture 1971 from Rutgers/ Douglas New Brunswick,NJ and I madly scramble, chintz, and plot to find time to work and to continue the valuable studio relationship that has served me well over the years. I am still excited by the studio and art historical approach to my work and I produce exquisitely-drawn figural compositions, abstract paintings and sculpture alluding to the Masque of Dante, of Caravaggio, of Michelangelo, of Rembrandt, of Chamberlain, the welder who fashioned large sculptural blocks of brightly- painted automobile body parts for display, and the dance of Durer's oeuvre', the melancholy of David Smith's archetypal placements, from Giacometti's compression in space of standing figures, the play of Sandy Calder, and the fantasy of Connecticut Yankee Milton Avery, and this artists' early romance with Ibram Lassaw's work, and David Hare's welded pieces. Should I stop there? I love it all! Eclecticism? No, just excitement about my influences and how much I appreciate the work of other artists I so love and admire.
At the University of Iowa, our time was a heyday of formalism and art historical study . All of us...we loved , admired, or were envious of, even disliked intensely our instructors given the task of breaking the news gently to us : the news being,- in order to “arrive at... the condition of Being” to be a “successful “artist, of finding the answer to the question why are we here? why am I here in this place?...one must enter the studio and live in it and make it an extension of a feeling of the sublime, a tabula rasa, the existential, the absurd, the comic. Some of us were there every day, I know I was. What to leave on the canvas, on the paper what to paint and what to draw? Lasansky, the printmaker knew some days we would not know what terrain we had crossed , compasses, maps to no avail. And if you met Lasansky in the art building halls on “one of those days”...he had taught for so many years and had so many students, he just lowered his head and walked by discreetly as if not to disturb.
I still dream of large sculptures, paintings drawings yet un-made in the world and I regularly looks through art books to see if someone has been listening to my dreams, prodding me to tell in my dreams what I am making and exhorting me to speak out the functional secrets of un-forgiving materials.
“One day, he says, 'I will find a way and the time and in the manner of which I am accustomed to and the works lying dormant along the evening bridge of the sky will be found completed with the dawning of a new day right here in my back yard.”
