I was born in Phila. Pa. in 1944.  At Central High-School I carved wood sculpture. In summer of 1961 I attended a summer session painting class with Morris Berd at the Phila. Museum of Art.  After the morning class I went over to the Arensburg Collection of modern art and there discovered the perfect reality --  Picasso, Gris, Mondrian, Cezanne & Duchamp. I studied these paintings many times: a Cezanne’s row of trees with brush marks that seemed to echo thru into Juan Gris’s blue window.  Then there was the startling arrival of Franz Kline’s Torches Mauve, a late vertical painting of about ten Ft. in height. Kline threw me off balance, but he opened up space. I really responded to the open brush work.  I painted my version of a Kline the next summer, on masonite purchased at a local lumber yard. Also my version of Picasso’s Three Musicians, using burlap and plaster borrowed from my father’s dental office. I entered art school at Phila. College of Art in fall of 1962 and liked it very much.  Among the teachers I remember well are Marvin “Buddy” Bileck for drawing and Gretna Campbell for my senior year in painting.  Bileck taught a very rigorous drawing and printmaking class with a strong emphasis on line. Gretna Campbell was a passionate and inspiring painting teacher.  She seemed to live thru the painting with you. Her remark to “paint the rocks and tree up close” still reverberate.
I entered the Yale Art School in Sept. of 1968. I had attended the Yale summer school at Norfolk in 1965 with William Bailey and Bernard Chaet as mentors. Louis Finklestein was a visiting critic as well as Robert Herbert from the Yale Art history Dept. who lectured on Impressionism.

There was a brilliant cello perfomance by Aldo Parisot. The Yale Art School in New Haven presented a completely different mode, and the first year was a difficult transition.  I spent summer of 1967 in Lowell Vermont with Marge Kramer and Noah Baen.  We painted outdoors and had a great exchange of ideas. The energy was way up. I got married to Robin at the end of that summer and headed to New Haven very refreshed!

Jack Tworkov gave me a lot of support at Yale and Al Held made some incisive comments, the classic “one liners” that only Al could deliver. I was awarded the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship for Painting when I graduated from Yale in 1968.  We moved to Soho and the next summer of 1969 traveled to Europe for three months.  I had my first show of paintings at the Paley & Lowe Gallery in spring of 1971. I showed a series of black stain paintings which received some good comment. I used ground graphite in acrylic medium. And also poured hot dye on the canvas. There was scraping/drawing with a spackle knife. I had a one-person show at Susan Caldwell Gallery in Soho in 1973. In summer of 1974 I was a resident faculty member at Skowhegan School in Maine. In particular, my wife and I took a week’s trip up to Mt. Katadan and I found this extremely invigorating.  We passed a dark old town called Aroostok which I remember liking very much.  The density of the forest was somewhat frightening, but the white sky and blue lakes made me calm. Returning to N.Y. in the fall of 1974, my wife announced that a baby was on the way.  Jesse Schiffrin arrived  in June of 1975. I was able to get a one-year teaching position at Brown University the following year, but this meant living half the time in Providence and was difficult. During the mid and late 1970’s I did a series in oil on canvas which grew out of a particular view of a roof and building facing North and East.  In 1979 I showed five large paintings at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University organized by Thomas Leavitt, entitled “Painting Up Front.” The exhibit did not travel beyond Ithaca. In 1980 I made a decision to enter the Dyestuffs business professionally and to continue painting the best I could.  I sincerely thank NYSS for organizing Governor’s Island Residency as it been a tremendous inspiration. 

 

Checklist

1.Tree and Water, 2007 Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

2.Study of Trees, 2007 Pencil on paper, 11 x 14 inches