Earliest
There’s a lot of guessing in this section - when did I do what work. It was all between 1971 (junior at Brooklyn Tech) and 1976 (in September I moved to SF), with Oberlin in the middle (AY 73-74).
Listening to much blues, British blues rock, and hard rock...Johnny was iconic for me...saw him at Madison Square Garden - form almost literally nose-bleed seats...I'd taken an art class at Pratt Institute (1972?) and turned this into a silk screen...
OK! Who votes for my deserving a share in profits from Beavis and Butthead, having drawn this around 1972?...I was drawing faces from album covers, the previous Johnny was pretty good...these may have been later but...
I was also reading an odd assortment of philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and - Aldous Huxley...around 1974, 19 y.o. ...
Done during the senior HS year after doing the summer class with Pratt: photography and silk screening. Fluorescent paints were involved, and as I recall, they had dried up. I ground and sieved the colors, then used them as watercolors to fill in this geometric design...
I've said in my adult year years that I don't have a talent for figurative work. And perhaps this is proof of that? Or, no, over all the pencil work here shows that I did have some ability...even if Rick wouldn't have been pleased with this...
Ah, along with philosophy I was exposed to strange corners of the art world - Dali, Magritte, and Heironymous Bosch. This sketch is likely based on Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights"...
This is a scan of a color xerox of another Bosch-based work. I gave the original to -someone. The background is a mix of textures from imagination, woods, patterns, sky...with the Boschian creatures overlaid...
Just a few sketches from memory/imagination...do I get any credit for Valdemort's face as well?...
I'd never seen mountains like this in person, it's a fantasy of such a landscape, which in some places includes Magritte-like impossibilities...
Intersection of science-fiction reading, album covers, and the socio-political world of the early 1970s...Survival is copied or traced from the Grand Funk (they'd dropped the Railroad?) album of the same name...
Fantasy Landscape I (lower) + 2 circa 1974
Art class at Oberlin...assignment was: an image with repeating shapes. A classmate saw what I was doing - he said he knew that the next ask would be to shade it. I thought, maybe she'll ask something different, so I went ahead as planned. Yes, next step was shading...teacher loved how I included that in the abstract...
Pastel, also done at Oberlin...
I dreamed this shape...and some version of the background, in pastel...also at Oberlin...
Done at Oberlin (73-74) - from a dream image...
So many question that I have, maybe the same as yours! Composition-wise, did he lose his legs? Thematically, what's the focus on death about? Does my Catholic upbringing show? How did Hitler end up there? But the woman in the upper right - maybe we focus on that apparition!...
My dad had a Sears-brand dremel tool (I still have and use it!) and I started...just grinding into things. A shop in the newly-opened Kings Plaza Mall sold cheap glass vases and I etched patterns in to them. One went to wonderful Aunt Elsie! Mind you, I used no protection..my 20-year old lungs exposed to glass dust...
An unfinished group of experiments...I look now at the stylized aspects, and the furniture design! I think the bottom figure, view from above (someone reading a newspaper?) - the little knotted ribbon at the back of the head is one of the nicest bits I've done!...