Last week, on my seventy-fifth birthday, I had a new adventure. As I do most days, I went downstairs to my studio and began working on another Artist Book.

After 50 years, my studio is still an exciting adventure. Everyday, I feel I am experimenting, learning and facing new problems. Very little is humdrum or deja vu. I love my solitude and the challenges I continually force myself to confront.

After all these years, I still encounter failure and frustration. The years of frustrations have given me an education in art, a course in psychology, and a Ph.D. in perseverance. “Keep going” has become a keystone of the adventure. If you keep on going, something eventually will happen. When it doesn’t, just throw away the old and begin again. Bandage the wounds and move on.

Happily, getting old means that more experiments are successful. When I was a young starting artist, an older painter told me that the visual arts are special because often artists get better with age. This cliche has offered me support and comfort, and seems, from my vantage point, to be true: I think my work is getting stronger as I age. I don’t have to think about what I am doing I just sense what needs to be done.

Paradoxically, perhaps because of my birthday, I took out of the drawer some artwork I’d done thirty or forty years ago. It surprised me. I could see myself and hints of my future work in the images, style and my experiments. Some was pretty good, certainly not the failures I recall thinking at the time.

Maybe getting old means getting easy or comfortable with oneself? Ease gets me bored. I like struggle. It forces me out of my comfort zone. I must find new solutions, and I keep discovering new projects, Artist Books, imagery, color palettes, new ways to use materials, and more.

So even now, I don’t feel old. My imagination is vigorous and sharp, and fortunately, continues to wake me up in the middle of the night with a slew of new projects. I continue to feel invigorated like a young man in search of an elusive treasure

From Hokusai: “From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before dthe age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.”

April 9, 2023

MY VISIT WITH JUAN DE PAREJA

It is alone that I most enjoy visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Roaming through the large domed rooms and long corridors excites in me the same feeling as standing in the center of a dark field under a starry sky; one feels minuscule, solitary, but also acutely aware of the transcendent powers of human intelligence. True, one is never alone at the Met but the presence of others need not be a hindrance. Rather, the comings and goings of others, their preoccupation with family and selfies, provides continual insight into human nature.

As a solo traveller, I have friends scattered throughout the museum.

December 31, 2021

At 75: An Artist Appraisal

Looking back and ahead after a lifetime of making art. Always an thrilling adventure into the unknown.

September 12, 2018

HOW TO START A PAINTING

No question: Even after a lifetime of making art, a blank canvas is intimidating. A blank canvas is perfect. It is untouched and therefore, has a unity of color and conception. The first mark it receives fractures this unity, and makes it imperfect. The artist is suddenly confronted with the problem of what to do next. Will the painting fail to meet the challenge posed by the empty, white canvas or will it succeed and create an identity all its own?

May 3, 2018

FIFTY YEARS DRAWING TREES

Fifty Years Drawing Trees

Trees, as a continuing subject of interest, have accompanied me through my life as an artist. I think it was Basil King, an older, more experienced artist and my informal mentor in the early 1970s who suggested I go out into the street and find some trees to draw.

January 20, 2017

LUNA PARK SERIES: PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS AND PRINTS

The exciting images on vintage postcards first attracted me to the theme of Luna Park, Coney Island. A confusion of forms, circles, linear zigzags, minuets, domes, and colors caught my attention. They were intoxicating, even disorienting.

January 4, 2017

WHAT IS STYLE?

By the 1980s, I had been making art already for fifteen years when I learned there was a gallery on Madison Avenue that, once every month, hosted an open house for unknown artists. It was a chance to show your work to a curator. If the curator liked it, a show might follow. Armed with a selection of slides, I waited nervously until it was my turn to show what I had done.

The curator looked attentively at every image, and. perplexed, turned to me and said: “ Your work is interesting but you don’t have a style. You need a style.”

October 26, 2016

THE CIRCLE IN MY ARTWORK (PART I)

THE CIRCLE, AS USED IN MY ARTWORK (PART I)

Some of the first shapes I started drawing and painting were circles. As a beginning painter, I like many others, tried painting still lives with fruit. Sure, a lemon isn’t a round circle, it is an oblong, but it was close. So were apples and oranges. The line began and ended at the same place, anywhere on the arch of the form. What was fascinating and challenging was the magic of creating volume with color. I struggled mightily, and still do, but never really learned the trick(s). Maybe you have to go to art school to do that?

September 29, 2016

THE PROBLEM OF SIGNING A PAINTING

Signing a Painting

Why do I resist signing my name to a painting? I can’t be the only artist with this problem. I wait and wait, sometimes years, until I can barely recall when I actually completed the work.

June 14, 2016

OLD & NEW: DEFINING AN ARTIST'S PERSONALITY

I was reading John Elderfield’s excellent book, “The Drawings of Henri Matisse,” and came across a Matisse quotation that attracted my attention. Matisse said that In his earliest works he
“found something that was always the same which at first glance I thought to be monotonous repetition. It was the mark of my personality which appeared the same no matter what different states of mind I happened to have passed through.”

Finding and then defining this “monotonous quality” is not an easy task.

Pablo Picasso: Mother and Dead Child, Sketch for Guernica, 1937.

March 13, 2016

ART THAT RATTLES

Long ago I read that art is inherently revolutionary because it challenges the viewer to rethink past assumptions about reality. The artist, in effort to find personal expression, presents a new vision or language which rattles earlier precepts, and forces the world to see itself anew.

February 24, 2016

Collaging Guston & Dubuffet

What fascinates me most about making collages is how disparate elements interact with one another to create something entirely different, unexpected, than the individual parts. The process is like a mystery unfolding in front of your eyes. And the artist is the detective. Frequently, some unnoticed mark, color or line in one element interacts with another in a way that hadn’t been anticipated. Collages have this wonderful surprise that keeps me coming back for more (Work/Collages).

In this blog, I wish to create a collage of words chosen, somewhat randomly, from the essays, lectures or interviews of two of my favorite artists: Philip Guston and Jean Dubuffet. My hope is that the juxtaposition of their words will sharpen our understanding of each artist while also broadening our view of art, and how it is made.

I will be quoting JD from the MOMA publication The Work of Jean Dubuffet, by Peter Selz with texts by the artist, and Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge.

February 17, 2016

WORKING IN SERIES I

The creation of the “Select Series” section of my website has allowed me to show samples of related work. Often series cross or combine mediums. Some series extend to more than 100 works. Only a small selection can be offered. In a unique way, the “Select Series” section permits the viewer an intimate glimpse into how I make art, and the aesthetic or narrative values that motivate my work. It challenges the viewer to see the breadth of my work without limitations of medium, technique or aesthetic definitions.

WORKING IN SERIES II

Being able to work in series gives me the ability to flesh out themes, revisit compositions, explore the deeper implications of ideas, and try out new techniques. Now I was free to experiment, and to take chances. If, once again, the medium took over, it was “okay.” I’d follow it, not to the cliff’s edge or over it but to a point in the process where I learned something I needed to know. “Try it, let’s see where it goes,” became my credo.

January 25, 2016

CHATTING WITH IMAGES

Chatting With Images

When Gauguin left for Tahiti (1891 and 1895) “ he took with him a trunk full of photographs and reproductions of art and artifacts that he admired, as well as books, sketchbooks and manuscripts… a portable reference library he would continually turn to for inspiration” (Gauguin, Metamorphoses, MOMA, 2014). He wrote, …”I am taking a whole little world of comrades who will chat with me every day.”