Prologue
I have been seeing and drawing and painting my whole life. I can afford to do that full-time now because I earned my living working in television news in Washington, DC, Toronto, Canada, the USSR, Israel, Poland, the old Czechoslovakia, and Hungary for over 20 years. I even received an Emmy Award.
While I painted during those times, my serious work started when I rented a studio first in Portsmouth, NH, in 1987 and then in Somerville, MA, in 2009. I am still in that studio.
Starting in 1987, I spent ten years living in southern Maine amassing parts of old lobster traps to create what I call my “assemblages.”
When I painted it was in muted tones, culminating in a large narrative painting based on a personal tragedy. Then I stopped painting for several years.
Urban Icarus
Oil on Belgian linen
The painting has been in juried shows where overheard comments were about how “beautiful” the painting is but no one, with one exception, wants to hang it on a wall in their home. The exception was a graduate from Harvard who asked his parents to give it to him as a graduation gift. They chose not to do that. The painting hangs discreetly in my studio and sometimes I reveal it to people.
It is still for sale.