100 Paintings: An Artist's Life in New York City

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Prologue: Given Up for Dead

Atruck arrived at the entrance to my Tribeca studio on February 23, 1996. Two just-doing-my-job art handlers removed six big canvases and placed them haphazardly around the front room. I couldn’t be bothered to tell them to put them in one spot or another because I was spiraling down through a depression, the likes of which I had never experienced before. My gallery of two years—the Dillon Gallery in Soho, which had sold dozens of my paintings in that period—had dumped me.

The scene at the Dillon Gallery had been disturbing in many respects, yet I still considered it miraculous to be selling paintings in New York City. It was the fulfillment of a fantasy spawned by a 17-year-old kid wandering the galleries of The Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s. I was hardly alone in this fantasy, this feeling of amazement. I was making a living from selling my paintings, something the folks back home, my father in particular, considered improbable.

Gallery owner Valerie Dillon was solicitous and charming, an attractive woman who flaunted blue eyes, an ebullient smile and blond hair. Her Dutch looks were curiously paired with a submerged English accent by way of London and Zimbabwe, her homeland. Val possessed an immediate likeability and had that quality all great sales people require: She lands a great first impression. What happened between the two of us is an old story of men and women, power and longing, but the age of a story never matters when you’re the one living it. I had stretched my principles as far as I could, determined to accept the realities of the marketplace and art world politics. It wasn’t enough. I had been unceremoniously kicked out of school.

When the art handlers left, I ignored the shrouded effigies they delivered, only paying attention to a badly damaged body part, my ego. It required continual applications of medication of which I was constantly running out: red wine and joints, which I mixed in copious amounts at unsociable hours. Disillusionment drew its constricting net tight around my mind’s eye, depleting my soul and obliterating my optimism. Worse, hopelessness distorted my past, present and future. Self-pity rolled in like a toxic cloud of methane.

I was disgusted with myself, my former gallery and an art world position to which I once aspired.

My wife, Helen, looked at me wide-eyed, as if I were a rabid animal. I’d always been disciplined and stayed healthy to run races and paint. An athlete, I’d won medals for track through high school and college. My style was to enjoy wine socially. The dissipated artist seeking inspiration in drugs and booze may be a familiar stereotype, but it was never me—not in college, not as an adult. Not even remotely.

Until now. Helen’s eyes spoke to me: What are you doing? What will you do now? My two children asked their mother, What’s wrong with Dad? Is he going to stay like this? I didn’t know myself.

The paintings were tightly bubble-wrapped with corrugated cardboard over that, also taped tightly. The nudes inside appeared to be dressed for a journey beyond the Arctic Circle. Time passed. Inevitably, the moment came when I unwrapped them. A razor knife was required to cut through the heavy tape. Barefoot, grizzled, hung over and depressed, wearing my dirty T-shirt inside out, I thought I’d raise my spirits by visiting a few old friends to commiserate about our mutual indisposition. The black coffee and Thai weed breakfast was in my blood and a boxcutter was in my hand. A disfigured creative energy devoid of wisdom kicked in. I zipped open the corrugated board and then the bubble wrap; the layers fell to the floor around my works like garments off a beautiful model. Bloodshot eyes and sodden consciousness beheld oil on canvas: Indian, Jester and Ballerina. I circled the room as terror beat its wings within my head.

I circled the room as terror beat its wings within my head. I inserted the knife into the linen and dragged the stiletto north to south with a cold indifference, destroying hours of impassioned labor.

I like oil paint to go about its business in the way only the painting medium can, an exacting craftsmanship produced by a simple tool, a paintbrush, skillfully engaged—the act of painting like beveling a diamond. I was illustrating people, places and things to stimulate and inform, to transport the viewer into pictorial space. I wanted to provide a realm outside of reality, but with vestiges of it, so the sojourning viewer feels not too lost (I was the guide in this strange place as Virgil is to the poet Dante in the great Italian poem Inferno). The viewer drops into this place outside of time, and travels as far as he or she can, no token required. Once you enter, you are gone from the room in which you stand. Your leather soles may rest upon the floor but your eternal soul is moving.

That’s how my art comes into being; that’s how I used to look at it. But now, as I surveyed each picture looking for the trace of these ideas and experiences, I found nothing. All I could see was meaningless color and abstract form. I saw no resemblance to the aforementioned beings. I was seeing only the lurid stuff of creation, not personages or graceful intent. The state of mind that inspired these canvases no longer existed. I had beseeched the viewer to perceive limbs, torsos or loincloth—they were not there now. Only these shifting plates of color and form, chaos, brokenness.

I inserted the knife into the linen and dragged the stiletto north to south with a cold indifference, cutting along hallucinated fault lines. I was destroying hours of impassioned labor. It mattered not. What a great feeling! The blade careened through the canvas, cleanly separating sections of anatomy into so many asymmetrical pieces, some dangling, others falling to the floor. An oddly visceral sensation washed across my senses, not unlike dragging a paintbrush across the very same surfaces with conscious intent to illustrate two men and a woman. I ripped and sliced while turning my head away, not so much to avoid witnessing the destruction as to let my unconscious inject its carefree child—Abandon—out to play. I cared not. I was disgusted with myself, my former gallery and an art world position to which I once aspired.

A given-up-for-dead creative instinct dared me to get me out of bed in the morning and be a different artist than I was yesterday. My studio, gallery and home is a storefront on Duane Street in Tribeca. The dismembered paintings were still dispersed across the gallery area, a large room just inside the front door. As I came and went daily, the individual segments of canvas caught my eye. I saw something random in each piece, depending on my mood, like looking at the cracks in the sidewalk or passing clouds and seeing cuneiform writing and citadels in the sky.

I stopped by each fragmented canvas, one by one. I found myself picking up the pieces and examining them, rotating them, perceiving them as separate forms disconnected from any previous composition. One morning I picked up all the pieces from the male nude and stacked them together in a pile. The original painting was 60 inches high and 48 inches wide. I walked across the room with the entire painting in a stack under my arm, no larger or thicker than a newspaper. I left the barren stretcher frame leaning against the wall. Sitting by the light, I tilted them backward, forward, pitch and yaw. I was seeing them as individual units, dimensional. I could surface-mount them with a flat surface tilted inward or outward.

That was a moment when I realized these paintings had an afterlife. I was tossing around in my mind how to make the pieces three-dimensional; to recompose them in order to have the surface the viewer encounters at an angle, not unlike the illusion of diffused space in a cubist painting, but now real space, 3-D space! The slice of canvas I held in my hand would have to be mounted on a material whose backside would be sanded at an opposite angle, then mounted on a flat hard surface. For weeks, I experimented and considered a wide variety of materials.

The paintings I had been making and exhibiting for the last five years were two-dimensional. They followed, however, a decade of three-dimensional works that had often bordered on theater. Now my mind’s eye hungered for the middle ground between painting and sculpture. Given the market access via my studio on Duane Street, they would have to be less edgy if I were going to make sales. I wanted these new 3-D paintings to have a genteel look, despite their aggressive technique. I wanted the aesthetic grace of fine art paintings.

The origin of each painting would be oil on canvas, morphed into a three-dimensional relief. Each work would have to succeed as oil on canvas first, sculptural relief second. In a few days, I was carving blue construction-grade foam I found at building sites, pulling it out of dumpsters after demolition around the city. I discovered that the older foam, tossed out after years of service as insulation in buildings, had hardened and lent itself to carving and sanding. The critical step proved to be adherence of the canvas to the foam. It required months to develop a bonding method that would not peel, bubble or part. It needed to be lasting and secure. Through trial and error, I discovered an adhesive combined with heat that chemically bonded with the blue Styrofoam and saturated the pores of the linen or cotton duck. The bond between canvas and foam became permanent. Environmentalists object to the use of foam generally because of its non-biodegradable character, but from an art-curatorial perspective it was perfect: stable, light, non-warping. Practically speaking, it lasts forever.

There have been other low points in my life as an artist, but never one like that, where I attacked my own work. But you could just as easily call it my work attacking me. I’d gotten too far from why I created art in the first place, and my subconscious was reminding me it was more than just a repository of treasure. The muse demands respect. Yet she’s forgiving: Out of destruction comes new life, if you’re willing to go deeper. Books and paintings had taught me this as a teenager and my soul had leapt in recognition. Now I was learning that lesson again.

The origin of each painting would be oil on canvas, morphed into a three-dimensional relief. Each work would have to succeed as oil on canvas first, sculptural relief second.

14. Male Nude. 1994. 28 × 40 in. Oil on gesso’d Arches rag paper. Collection of the artist.

15. Torso with Torch. 1999. Oil and acrylic on canvas over sculpted foam. 51 × 47 × 4 in. Collection of the artist.

16. Rider. 1998. Oil and acrylic on canvas over sculpted foam. 60 × 48 in. Collection of the artist.

17. Bed of Stone. 2000. Oil and acrylic on canvas over sculpted foam. 60 × 72 × 6 in. Collection of the artist.

18. My Pretty Bird. 2007. Oil on canvas over sculpted foam. 68 × 54 × 5 in. Collection of the artist.

19. Native American with Peace Pipe. 2003. Oil on canvas over sculpted foam. 48 × 41 × 2 in. Collection of the artist.

20. Purple Goddess. 1999. Oil on canvas over sculpted foam. 54 × 40 × 3 in. Collection of the artist.

21. Bruce. 2000. Oil and acrylic on canvas over sculpted foam. 68 × 54 × 5 in. Collection of the artist. (Inspired by the photography of Allan Tannenbaum.)

22. David Bowie. 1999. Oil and acrylic on canvas over sculpted foam. 50 × 56 × 5 in. Collection of the artist. (Inspired by the photography of Allan Tannenbaum.)

23. Not My Eyes. 2004. Oil on canvas over sculpted foam. 52 × 68 × 4 in. Collection of the artist.

24. Ballet. 1998. Oil on canvas over sculpted foam. 68 × 48 × 5 in. Collection of Chrystal Dyer and Hugh LaRoche.

25. Black Beach Beauty. 2012. Oil and sand on canvas over sculpted foam, brushed copper. 48 × 65 × 5 in. Collection of the artist.

PART I  ACTION PAINTER

26. Action Painter. 2005. Oil on canvas. 84 × 40 in. Collection of the artist.

Surrealism and a World Record

Alife-changing experience: gazing into Larry Rivers’ painting Lions on the Dreyfus Fund III. I encountered it at The Art Institute of Chicago as a 14-year-old student in 1964. It spoke to me in a language of paint that I instinctively understood. From that moment on, painting for me was breathing. I filled volumes of portfolios and rooms with canvases, objects and drawings. Many of these works have survived, but I did not consider myself good enough to sign a painting. (In spite of my vociferous objections, my wise and caring father often added my name in the lower right-hand corner.)

27. Homage to Dada (front, back). 1985. Fiberglass legs; steel armature; lead apron, box and skirt; X-ray; internal light; beating heart. 70 × 30 × 30 in. Collection of the artist.

Two years later, I stood in line at the Institute and met a new idol: Marcel Duchamp, then nearly 80 and in the last years of his life. He signed a poster I had in my hand, an image of one of his ready-mades, using a pseudonym: Rrose Sélavy. I was ecstatic. I had discovered Duchamp’s work the way I discovered so many artists—by wandering the halls of the Institute. That year was the origin of an artistic sensibility that would later ripen and is still maturing. I saw no reason then, nor see one now, to cage or limit this sensibility.

My father was an industrial designer, my mother a self-educated reader who introduced me to poetry over the breakfast table—Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot. Very early, I was seduced by the power of both images and words; they nurtured a secretive and transformative imagination, always looking and always finding. I was riveted by the revolutionary doctrine of André Breton: I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak …

These words set me on fire, as they do so many young artists just coming into the wealth of the psyche. I had already embraced the image-driven, silk-screened, splattered, encaustic, billboard paintings of the New York School: Duchamp’s first graduating class (via Black Mountain College). I recognized the symbolic and literal references as indicators of meaning. These artists and their counterparts in Europe simply chose an image, no context required. This was the heart of Duchamp’s action, the essence of the found object: Simply select. These meaning-laden references were signposts along a pathway. Following my eye, I had entered the great labyrinth of ideas.

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak…

—André Breton

Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

My initial attraction to the post-World War II American school of painters expanded. Their overall look and feel influenced me; their visual aesthetic enraptured me. I understood the New York School art stars and I appreciated their mission but I craved something more. American society was becoming commercial and materialistic. These pioneers of postwar American art sought an expression of that kind of subject matter, some of which, in retrospect, seems naïve, but remains a chronicle of the changing complexion of American life in the 1960s. Ultimately, Robert Rauschenberg went political, Andy Warhol became a curious dinner party gadfly of the rich and famous, and Jasper Johns remained the thinking man’s painter. Larry Rivers’ work still drives me to my knees. I loved their unfettered American energy and idolized them all, including Jimmy Rosenquist—who later became a friend and neighbor in Tribeca—and, of course, Roy Lichtenstein.

By 1967, I was ready to embrace surrealism—transportive, daring, imaginative and gorgeous—but in the end I found it to be more drama than substance, hollow without the raw purity of Dada. Although technically masterful, and of noble spirit, the surrealists did not sustain my interest. Max Ernst, Salvadore Dali and others understood the unconscious realm they portrayed. But because they set out to describe it, rather than become it, they were doomed.

28. Ferris Wheels for the Insane. 1982. Oil on canvas. 84 × 84 in. Collection of the artist.

29. Home for Humanity. 1977–80. Mixed media kinetic construction with neon. 78 × 78 × 15 in. Collection of the artist.

31. For the Women’s Movement. 1977–1980. Carved and laminated wood, oil paint and mixed media. 65 × 65 × 10 in. Collection of the artist.

30. Visiting Artist. 1977. Brushed aluminum exterior, stuffed satin interior, sculpted skull, sliding plexiglass enclosure. 48 × 48 × 19 in. Collection of the artist.

32. Fools Gold (working drawing). 1981. Graphite on paper. 18 × 24 in. Collection of the artist.

33. Fools Gold (two views). 1981. Wood, steel, motorized gears, neon, plastic. 28 × 11 × 4 in. Collection of the artist.

34. Aspects of Archeology. 1985. Three-dimensional mixed media kinetic construction, neon and paint. 60 × 50 × 24 in. Collection of the artist.

35. The Enola Gay. 1987. Oil on canvas. 60 × 72 in. Collection of Sally and Al Ordonez.

I had existential needs that surrealism spoke to, but I wanted to transform those needs and insights from literature and theater into an art object that would live on the wall.

Yet I learned technique from many of them, and they spoke to me of my European heritage. The sinuous classical oil surfaces of European masters were part of my practice already. I’d spend years copying the color and brush strokes of great painters, working my way forward from the Italian Renaissance to impressionist masterpieces. To embody the surreal, of course, is a dicey undertaking. Surrealism’s domain is the mind’s deepest recess, where the death instinct resides, along with sex: Surrealism takes much of its power from Eros and Thanatos. I had existential needs that surrealism spoke to, but I wanted to transform those needs and insights from literature and theater into an art object that would live on the wall. Over the next couple of years, I found inspiration in other art forms that merged symbol, movement, poetics, theater and, most of all, graphic appeal: Federico Fellini’s 8½, Allen Ginsberg’s recording of Howl, the installations of Edward Keinholz. I read all the Beat poets and writers and went to Ginsberg’s and Gregory Corso’s readings in Chicago, feasted on William Burroughs, and frequented the surreal and underground cinema, particularly the French and the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. I read the symbolist poets and the French existential philosophers.

My ultimate destination turned out to be unconscious structures of the mind, described by Freud in The Ego and the Id. During those avid teen years, I was analyzing all types of form and design in nature and the manmade world: radial, spiral, bilateral symmetry and asymmetry. I viewed the cracks in the sidewalk and formations of passing clouds as more than accidental. I was drawn to the threshold where rationality confronts the arbitrary. I came to Freud via Nietzsche: I love him who lives in order to know.… I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going. I seemed to understand this innately. A powerful creative faculty was making itself known to me, a design theory evolving from what lay within. I would spend my life down-going.

As I write, I am recalling the trek to the frontier taken at a very early age—a frontier from which I suspected I would never return. It was necessary and it was dangerous. I was listening to the voice of a stubborn sanity unwilling to squeeze a widening awareness to fit the mold of normal life in the Chicago suburbs. Within the apparently illogical, accidental and chaotic, I sensed truth and saw beauty, both territories far more alluring than conventional life. I felt empowered by my sojourn. The madman was really quite sane—in fact, a genius. The net effect of my investigations would be the demystification of the absurd, the unknown, the insane and of chaos itself. I sought their inclusion within a painter’s intellect—or I should say, I allowed myself to see what was already entirely present.

The net effect of my investigations would be the demystification of the absurd, the unknown, the insane and of chaos itself.

What I was seeing was not in doubt, but I felt compelled to understand why I was seeing the world so differently than other kids on the schoolbus. I knew I would be required to create a new self. Painters and sculptors, writers and filmmakers, artists and thinkers of many eras pointed the way. I was not afraid.

As a high school student, I was enrolled in a Saturday class at the institute’s junior museum school (SAIC). I learned a great deal from a few excellent instructors. After the first semester I received a summer scholarship, and a year later I was teaching the figure drawing class to my teenage peers. One Saturday morning, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin strode rebelliously into a full class where a posed nude reclined. These strange creatures—yippies, they called themselves—passed out pamphlets inviting us to a gathering in Grant Park, which bordered the museum property. The Democratic Party was holding its convention in Mayor Daley’s town. Later in the day, the Grant Park riots occurred: cops on horseback vs. the yippies. The guys on horseback won. That night, the neighborhoods were ablaze.

The political ferment of the ’60s fed my art obliquely, and the yippies with their Dadaist acts (throwing dozens of dollar bills from the Visitor’s Gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, announcing their intent to levitate the Pentagon) were emblematic of what linked that period with the creative ferment of post-World War I Europe. The artist was a king and a joker, always a rebel. The artist had unassailable dignity because he was the first to throw it away in the search for truth.

I love him who lives in order to know. I love him who labors and invents, that he may build the house for the Superman, and prepare for him earth, animal, and plant: for thus seeks he his own down-going.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883

I had become a better draftsman than my teachers. They had no problem with that. Drawing was my life. Every summer, I worked as a mechanical draftsman in my father’s industrial design practice. The balance of my free time was spent freehand drawing at The Art Institute. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was drawing from both hemispheres of the brain. I was seeing it all—as a dispassionate draftsman and as a passionate young artist.

The logical outcome of an unrelenting inclusion of all manner of form in creation is obsession. I had adopted the belief that painting was the thinking man’s game, yet I had a natural talent for drawing, painting and color. I drew, painted and sketched every night and spare moment. Ideas became paintings. Anything could become a painting. This was my credo: Never repeat