AN ARTIST'S ROOTS

I was raised in an environment where the arts were held in high esteem. My older brother was on the stage in college and became a writer and editor. My father was a small town doctor who believed in the practice of medicine as his expression of art, even as he was envious of those who could work in the more traditional media of music or painting. My mother, a painter in her own right, infused in me as a child a feeling of awe and mysticism about the mechanics of painting - the smell of oils and turpentines, the mustiness of the studio, the vast assortment of little tubes and brushes at the art store. Together my parents would take me often to Manhattan museums and to Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. Growing up in the late fifties and the sixties, I was exposed to the wild exuberance of pop and op art. I used to love running around the Guggenheim, dashing from an exploding Lichtenstein to an introspective Pollack. When I was eight years old - and again at the age of fifteen - I was taken to Europe, where I revelled in the works of the masters. As I grew I began to more deeply appreciate and comprehend the development of painting and sculpture.

There has never been a time when my life was without some form of artistic expression. As a child I always had an easel and paints in my room - and my parents consistently encouraged my efforts. I remember passionately trying to convince a kindergarten teacher that the images in my coloring book were merely suggestions, not rigid lines of demarcation. In my teens, I began formal study at Westtown School - and I spent summers with local artists learning to draw and to work in three dimensions. Later, at Bard College, I fell in with several art students and teachers in the art department. Within a short time, I knew with certainty what I had always known at some level - that my life and my art were one in the same.