About 25 years ago, I realized being a salesman would drive me mad unless I could balance that career with a hobby that allowed for unfettered expression, a high margin of error, and could release inner turmoil...so I didn't take up golfing or other avocations that end in rehabilitation...I began instead to take art classes at the local JC.

I'd studied art history and literature in college, spent a semester in Florence where I began to see the world in technicolor...Renaissance murals will do that to you. Through the years I have practiced landscape painting, abstract expressionism, still-life, sumii ink drawing and cartooning. All helped me begin to have a sense of my own energy and its response to the surroundings. It is all so personal.

But it wasn't until I took classes in figure drawing that the expressiveness of color and shape began to connect with meaning, statement, relationship. I suppose that having spent so much time reading novels, short stories and poems, it was natural that narrative would be really important; after all, without people what else is there. Certainly, the humanism that was the heart of the Renaissance--people and portraits--has had a profound influence on me.  For that matter, so has 42 years of marriage, 3 children, 2 sisters, one really personal Italian family. We pose, posture, pretend and often profoundly and simply relate to each other. There were 4 teachers whose instruction in techniques and encouragement made it possible for me to continue working at this craft. Also several practicing artists who share their insights and criticism with me.

So the figures in art are in relationship and turn to each other. Sometimes the figures are part of a single scene; sometimes they are adjacent but not involved with the dominant parts. Isn't that life? While a central event is taking place, many different transactions between people are occurring. Each person participating or observing or standing by is taken by his or her imagination "out of the picture" so to speak. And to be honest with you, don't you find your mind cluttered with memories, wishes, encounters, regrets and plans that all have to do with the people who played parts in your life? We're all about the stories we tell each other.

We need either a damn good exorcising of them or at least a format to put them in their proper places. That's what is taking place in these works. Anything you see in a frame was done with joy and a sense of delight at the outcome.  The rest didn’t get frames. An art teacher once said to me that every time you work at art you are stepping into the same current that all other artists entered. The "primitive" artists, the German Expressionists are my ancestors.

What you see here was drawn in the following way. First I lay in a design of colors. The pattern becomes a background out of which figures begins to emerge. I don’t ask them to come out and play. I invite them and often they show up.  I usually don’t have an end in mind when I begin but at some point a sense of the whole, a composition begins to reveal itself. The media used are water colors markers, ink pens, graphite and erasers. The ground is watercolor paper, 160 or 300 lb. usually. The works are not coated, so are fugitive and would fade if placed in direct light. 

The drawings are meant to be taken off the wall and looked at like you'd look at the Sunday Comics or a rotogravure.  I see them in front of or between books in your bookcase, behind a figurine, decanter or table lamp in your living or dining rooms. There is a narrative and you might find it as enjoyable as a crossword puzzle or Bob Dylan song in figuring out what it all means. Of course, there is not single interpretation. Help me with the story.

I grew up in southeastern Connecticut and went to the best public schools possible and lived in a Catholic parish that taught me to search for the sacred.  Really. I received a BA in English at Syracuse University, joined VISTA in 1966 where I worked in the ghettoes of Philadelphia for a humbling 15 months. I traveled across country in the Summer of Love and met my lifelong beloved in San Francisco within days. Aldous Huxley would have been proud of us. 

We raised three self-reliant children, 14 dogs, 5 cats, 4 birds, and a mouse. We live in the glorious wine country north of the city. My mother and sisters still live "back east" and one daughter lives in New York City, so I pilgrimage to Connecticut and New York during the inspiring spring and breathtaking autumns. I avoid humidity and frost as if they were pestilence and plague. Lou Gehrig and I both know how lucky we have been.