Welcome to this collection of images and stories to celebrate my 30th year as an exhibiting artist. I plan to use each of the 30 days of April to share at least one work, perhaps an installation view, and some memories.
I graduated from college in the spring of 1993, but still had to complete a study term abroad to receive my diploma. I spent the summer of 1993 in the eastern German town of Jena. I was drawing all. the. time. that summer. And I made a lot of watercolors.
In the early 1990s I would go to the college library and pore over the art magazines I couldn’t afford to subscribe to. Back then it it seemed like there was no way to open an art magazine and NOT see an ad or a review for a Sean Scully exhibition. I photocopied so many articles. I also kept an Xacto knife with me. Knowing that other students would read the articles, I never cut an image from an article. But if there was an ad with image I liked (needed!) and it didn’t have the text of an article on the opposite side, it was fair game for my collection, which I kept organized in a large manilla expanding file folder. I still have it.
The first sentence of a November 1985 “ArtNerws” article about Scully began with a quote: “My stripes push out in to the world, trying to be more than paintings. The energy flies off into something unkown.” This just captured everything I wanted for my own work.
But in the fall of 1994, I was back in Pennsylvania living in my parents’ home. I had an “art gallery” job…selling a lot of dreadful and a handful of tasteful prints to tourists in Lancaster County’s Amish country. It paid so poorly I couldn’t afford an apartment. After about 6 months living at home I finally found myself a comically tiny studio in an artist warehouse building in downtown Lancaster which I also couldn’t really afford.
Those were the days when you could go to a new store called “Borders Books” and look at anything you wanted for as long as you wanted. Almost like the library…but I didn’t dare cut up the stuff there! However at Borders I discovered the fairly new publication “Modern Painters.”, which was my introduction to the work of Howard Hodgkin. His approach to color was something unlike anything I’d seen and I was completely gobsmacked.
Lancaster had a small but active bohemian scene, with some good late night poetry at coffeehouses, an independent theatre company, a good indie music club, a few bookshops, one contemporary art gallery, and a cool art supply shop that had a gallery above. Another local bookshop called Artemis Books also had a kind of gallery program. In the winter of 1994 they offered to show my work later that summer.
And so it began…my first studio and an exhibition to work for! Drunk on the expressive structuralism of Scully and the jubilant color of Hodgkin, I made 7-8 modestly sized paintings and a suite of what I called “color notes” which were actually tiny color fields. A local band called “Inca Campers” played at the reception. I thought they were the coolest! (Turns out they’re still around!) I only remember selling one of the color notes, and giving another painting to some friends for a wedding present. The whereabouts of the above painting “Slab” is unknown, but it was a treat to find it among my slides and think back to that season when I made it…so innocent and full of possibility. (sorry about the quality of the image…never knew I’d one day want to “scan” a slide with a “phone” haha!)