chronology
1963
Born in Binghamton, New York.
1970
My parents share a camp with another family in the Adirondack Mountains. I grow up there, hiking the thousands of square miles of New York State parkland that is our backyard. I stumble upon a small community of the last Adirondack hermits, and since I bring them cookies they welcome me into their shacks. It is fascinating to see how they occupy their time, all kinds of forgotten folk crafts like sewing button dolls, weaving cigarette wrappers, carving frames out of cigar boxes. I start drawing all the time, with whatever is at hand, and am fortunate that my family encourages me.
1976
My parents send me to military school to try and curb my rambunctious behavior. I am an awful student, unable to tell time, utterly mystified by fractions and long division. Unmotivated by discipline, I do a lot of marching around the flagpole. To pass the time in detention, I draw in the margins of my textbooks, which only gets me into more trouble.
1981
I enroll at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. It is a good time to be a student in New York; the eighties are in full swing and art is everywhere, people excited by what they see. C.B.G.B.’s is right down the street, and when school closes at midnight we just head there to keep talking. I know I want to be painter. A friend and I take the train to Washington and go to the National Gallery, where I find two paintings by Albrecht Durer. One is a study of a bird wing, and the other a small watercolor of a beetle. They make a huge impression on me. I tack postcards of them to my studio wall, but nobody seems to notice.
1983
In my third year, I exchange to the Slade School of Fine Art in London. I spend most of my time driving around the U.K. and Ireland, make trips to Italy and France, and do an extensive series of graphite drawings full of arcadian imagery. I go to the National Gallery every day. The huge and empty galleries feel abandoned, and the heat doesn’t work so well. I spend hours in front of The Nativity by Piero Della Francesca, wondering how he painted the faces of the singing angels, almost as if he breathed upon the surface and gently rubbed with the palm of his hand until they appeared. It seems as if they were always there, only needing a little encouragement to show themselves.
1986
Once I graduate, everyone tells me to get some time away from New York, so I move to Houston to attend the Glassel School of Art. I love Texas, the sheer bigness of it all, and drive all over in an old Checker Marathon without air conditioning. I substitute for a few courses, and the classes are full of lonely housewives and debutantes, but it is tremendous fun. Artists come for three-day seminars, and they wander into my studio and ask me why I’m not in New York.
At the first sign of the Texas summer, I reclaim my lease on a railroad flat in New York’s East Village. I spend the summer making paintings in the kitchen, cooking up mediums on the stove, red lint from the indoor/outdoor carpeting sticking to the varnish. I meet Phillip Dash, who works nights as a waiter at the Odeon. By day, he runs a gallery around the corner from me, and in a year I have my first solo show with him. The paintings sell as we are hanging them, and since it is May and already quite hot, we hire a neighborhood man with a snow cone cart to work the opening.
The alchemy of painting appeals to me, and I end up working for a lot of artists. I grind paint, do gold leaf, make chalk gesso, build wood panels, stretch linen. I fix things. My phone rings a lot. I do a lot of work for a forger named David Stein, but one day the FBI calls, wanting to know his whereabouts. Rather than face any more questions, I take what is supposed to be a week of gold leafing for Julian Schnabel, and end up working for him for seven years. I travel the world, gluing plates back on paintings. We spend the winters in Palm Beach, the summers in Montauk. A girl from Ohio named Gail comes to work for us; she cooks and takes care of the kids and I marry her 11 months later. We go to Ireland for our honeymoon.
1989
Michael Walls gives me a show in his new gallery in Soho. I show big paintings on plywood, a series of gouaches and jars full of garbage that I sweep up off the street in front of the gallery. I go to Italy rather than face the opening, looking at Giottos and Massachios. We sell the gouaches, some of the paintings and none of the garbage. There are no reviews, and I find the whole experience very rewarding.
1991
After another trip to Ireland, I show a series of paintings dedicated to three IRA terrorists who were killed in Gibraltar by British troops. The floor of the gallery is covered with 2500 pounds of Katahdin potatoes, on top of which lie three wool blankets dyed like the Irish tricolor. A huge painting, like a watery Irish flag made with varnish and pigment, is inspired by a line from James Joyce, about oranges being laid to rust upon the greens. I get a lot of attention, National Public Radio does a piece on me and the show sells out. A pig farm in upstate New York is happy to get the potatoes. Gail and I spend the summer in Montauk, a small fishing village on the eastern-most end of Long Island. We rent a house on the water and start surfing the swells from offshore hurricanes. Hurricane Bob goes over Montauk in August, and I watch waves 30 feet high pound the shoreline and stand helpless as the winds rips my tomato plants out of the ground.
1993
Gail and I move to Bellport, a pleasant town on the south shore of Long Island. That winter, we get 17 blizzards, and getting out of the driveway becomes a daily adventure. Gail goes to school in Stony Brook, I stay home and paint and make dinner and watch our savings dwindle. We quickly realize that we can never move back to New York. We walk the beach, sit by the fire and life seems a whole lot simpler. I take one of the bedrooms as a studio, but making big abstract paintings seems positively ludicrous. I start painting the shells and crabs I find on the beach, and there is something there, a note of recognition. Nobody will show them, so once spring comes I keep on with larger, more abstract work. The shells sit in a portfolio, taunting me.
1994
I have more shows in New York, but nothing happens. We end up in Montauk again, almost by default, and I paint houses and refinish furniture while Gail stays closer to the city to finish school. Montauk in winter is somewhere between the middle of nowhere and the end of the line… the end of nowhere. I start walking the beach with our dogs, and when one of them tries to eat a jellyfish, I learn to keep my eyes planted firmly ahead. I can’t stop myself from picking up odd bits and pieces of flotsam and bringing them home. Then I start making paintings of them.
1998
Lizan Tops gallery in East Hampton sees my paintings of rocks, and offers me a show. People respond to them in a way that I find very gratifying, and other galleries begin to show an interest that seems like the beginning of something.
2000
Gail and I buy a small catboat called a Beetlecat, a gaff-rigged wooden sailboat built in 1963. A month later, our dog Lucy dies, and we name the boat after her. I spend countless hours restoring the brightwork and refitting the hardware, and she leaks all summer but we have great fun keeping her afloat. We get an Irish Terrier puppy as a companion for our other dog, Bill, and we name her Francis. She is very fresh and easily wins us over.
2003
Antarctica. The National Science Foundation sends me to Antarctica as part of their artists and writers program, and the experience leaves me at once awestruck and befuddled. Icebergs, penguins, glaciers, the light and space are beyond words, and thus far, fairly beyond images, too. It is all just so slightly beyond my grasp, but slowly - very slowly - coming into focus.
As for the present, I live on an island off the coast of Maine with Gail, Francis and an imaginary pig named Lunchbox. We bought a house last year, and it gives new meaning to "a real fixer-upper", but after paying rent for so many years, I actually don't mind writing the mortgage check every month.
Life in the studio is good. There has been an endless procession of birds for the past several years, and last summer, a little girl came up to me and asked "Are you the bird guy?" I responded, somewhat reluctantly, that yes, I suppose that was me. "Well," she said, pointing off to her left, "then what kind of bird is that, and what's it doing?"
Looking over, there was no mistaking a Peregrine Falcon on someone's front yard.
"That's a Peregrine Falcon," I said.
"But what is it doing?" she asked.
I looked a bit closer, and before I could edit my response, I said, "I think it's eating a dead kitten."
The little girl screamed and ran away.
Nature can have that effect.
