I am disposing of the traditional linear biography format and hope you will find this more informative and interesting. If you wish to see a listing of shows, prizes, fellowships, and degrees, please contact me by email and I will provide you with a pdf document.
For the longest time I fretted over my life and art career not fitting into a neat package. There are of course, established ways we "should" all follow to show the world how clever, organized, and in control we are of our art and how we get ahead with it. Of course this is rarely true for any person, least of all artists. We all know, but rarely say, that life in work and life in general is filled with twists and turns, wrong turns and dead ends, blind luck or lack of it. How we handle all of this is what makes life interesting and our stories compelling.
Let me share where "art" fits in to all of this for me. Art for me is first a language, the most natural way by which I can express things important to me. Of course I sell my work, and so it has become a career too, but that came second. In my case, art has always been the "only" way for me to communicate those things I find or have found absolutely essential. Images inform me and I converse with them. That has been the case since I was a child. Art is necessity for me.
I was raised in very prosperous family from New Orleans, Louisiana. My father and mother loved and cared for me along with my two brothers. Our home was created with the help of some of the most wonderful people you can imagine, mostly but not all African Americans. It was the "Jim Crow" South, but in my home, you would not have known it. Like lots of people of their generation, at the end of WWII, my parents lived large and fast and focused. They did not always have time to focus on their kids, but neither did they forget or neglect us. In fact, they were adventuresome and curious people who included us in many adventures, introduced us to many interesting situations and characters, most of which and who show up in my work to this day.
I was not a great student in the traditional subjects at school, perhaps they didn't capture my imagination as some things did, nor did I push myself until later in life to explore them. However I was and remain a very curious and adventuresome person, a legacy passed along by many generations on both sides of my family.. I like action, change, and experimentation. I was educated at great private schools, from Louisiana to New Hampshire. I have two undergraduate college degrees, one from the University of the South in Tennessee in history and one from the Rhode Island School of Design in painting in Providence, Rhode Island. In addition, I have numerous credits in the likes of accounting, computer science, photography, and Spanish from institutions such as Tulane University and American University. I have worked as a cab driver, construction worker building offshore oil platforms, middle manager in a comic book publishing company in Mexico, lending officer in a New York Bank. I learned to speak Spanish in a communist language institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I have travelled the world in unusual circumstances, learning a lot along the way that I could not learn in school.
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For eighteen years I was the president, CEO and ultimately owner of a publishing and printing company that I built and sold. It was big, complicated, and frighteningly demanding at times, but taught me a lot about the rough and tumble part of American business life. I started the first Internet service provider in New Orleans, envisioning the importance of business to business internet communication and have been immersed in computers and computing and the Internet ever since. All along the way, I painted and drew and made objects with my hands because I needed the depth of images to speak to a world outside of myself and I needed to process the things I experienced. I never thought that what I was doing was anything other than "speaking" and "processing" in the way that was most natural to me. I did continue to show my work at every turn, often to great applause. The idea of making "art" was very important, but it was not special or exclusive, it was rather my visual sense of things, coming from the way I naturally perceive their depth or weight, their presence or story.
I showed my work at places like the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Lilly Islin Gallery, Virginia Lynch Gallery, in Rhode Island and the Contemporary Art Center and Simonne Stern Gallery and Aldrich Leatherman Gallery in New Orleans. I have received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson Vermont and worked closely with the folks at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk Connecticut and 10 grand Press in Brooklyn, NY.
I love art. I love to look at it, study it, and especially make it. I also love life and the people in my life, I think it's important to say, perhaps even more than art. I have been married for 35 years to my wife, Elissa. We have 3 sons, a daughter who is married and now we have 3 grand children. Life is so full. The images keep emerging as I paint or sculpt or print or draw, and invite me, and perhaps they invite you, into the mystery imbedded or beyond the wall .
Again, if you would like to know more, I would encourage a studio visit. These experiences and my impressions along the way all show up in my work. Of course, as promised, I will gladly send along too a proper resume via email and pdf.
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