About The Artist

I could always draw. As an infant my mother would set me down on the living room floor and I would cut out from old newspapers whales and tigers and camels with a pair of blunt scissors. I had no musical or mathematical ability but I spent my childhood with india ink and water colors and tempera and wide assortments of crayons and Mongol pencils. I have notebooks filled with drawings that my mother saved. In high school I took art and won at least one prize for something that I did but no longer remember.

But to be a serious artist you must have two things. Extraordinary ability and a savage compulsion to represent the world around you. I did not believe I had such ability and I certainly was lacking in compulsion. So after high’ school I drifted off in different directions. I did draw from time to time but with no great drive or interest. Then in my old age, I was in my mid eighties at the time, on a food shopping trip I picked up entirely by chance a tray of vials of water colors and on impulse purchased it. There were ten colors plus black and white. I placed the tray in a closet and forgot about it for several years. Then one day I remembered the tray, retrieved it, and began, in a slap dash fashion, to put images on paper.

Suddenly I was hooked. I began to paint every day. I bought a camera and took beach scenes along the boardwalk. I cut out photographs from magazines and newspapers. I painted family members from photos I had of them. I found art material suppliers and bought a copious supply of tubes of acrylic and brushes and palettes and other required materials. This compulsion lasted for roughly three years, and then as suddenly as it had come on, it departed. I think I had gone about as far as I could go. I was repeating myself.

I am now in my middle nineties and I don’t imagine the impulse will return any time soon. But I have perhaps eight hundred eight by eleven paintings  on copy paper, of which about three hundred are worth looking at. At least I enjoy looking at them and perhaps some others may as well.