We have believed in magic since time immemorial.  We ascribed magical intent to the cave drawings at Lascaux which is one of the earliest examples of man communicating with his fellow man.  A child has no such foresight about this but knows magic when he sees it, which is when he begins to draw.  This sense of magic has sustained me throughout my life.  We have never forsaken each other.  I have little doubt but that my mother determined my career as an artist.  She was so committed to this idea to this idea and so persuasive that she convinced the entire family as well as myself of the remarkable gifts I possessed.  I was undoubtedly an easy mark for it set me above other children.  Not only was I both better and different than the other children but my parents were better and different than the other parents.  We had rooms full of books in the house.  They decorated our living room, as they were an integral part of our lives.  Between the two of them my parents spoke more than a dozen languages.  My mother was endlessly worried as to who was cultured and who was a fishwife having an uncanny ability to  identify the latter.   My father wondered if there was anyone available in our area with which he could discuss Kant, Hegel and Graetz.  My sister Grace who was brilliant had cerebral palsy.  This pretty much confining her to the house where she read voraciously, remembering almost all of what she took in.  All of this was happening in the little town of Lakewood NJ a farming and resort community 60 miles from New York.

It was hard for me to locate my essential being in this environment.  I did have an anchor in art.  Other than that all I wanted to do was ride my bike and play baseball.  This pretty much consumed my early childhood.  I did begin to wonder about my sister Grace.  Why was it that I was free as a bird while Grace’s universe was that of books?  I felt badly about this but didn’t think about it too much, else God only knew where my thoughts and actions might have taken me. So I decided what I could do was make Grace laugh.  My sense of humor developed for Grace’s enjoyment and hopefully her delight.  It really disturbed me that she never complained to me that I was so lucky to be able to move around so freely.   I didn’t understand it then and don’t now.  Grace lived well into her 70’s with never a word of jealousy towards me while only on the rarest occasions lamenting of life’s injustices and fates decree’s. Everyone should have one mythic person in their life. Grace was mine.  I do know that I continued to develop my sense of humor and whimsy welcoming it into my art in a significant way.

Much the same pattern prevailed in high school.  I was the “class artist”.  I could make cartoons. I could make portraits of Theodore Hertzl for my mother’s friends.  I had also become one of the class humorists.  I was always one of the smartest kids in the class but never the smartest.  This never presented a problem for I was an artist.  I always understood from  my   mother that society placed the greatest of premiums on creativity.  With this in mind, when selecting a college to go to, I decided on my father’s alma mater Cornell to study medical and scientific illustrations, which would enable me to go on expeditions throughout the world as detailed in my National Geographic. 

I   arrived at Cornell a primitive and  a naïve.  I had been sent  to NYC to buy my    college suit.    The salesman suggested a single-breasted grey flannel suit   was indicated.  Knowingly, instead I bought a double-breasted dark brown suit to be offset by   a vivid large-scale floral tie.  Little did I realize that only    three other people in the western   world owned such a suit-Charles DeGaulle, Anthony Eden and   Dean Atchison.    After my first weekend in Ithaca I realized I should never wear this suit.  It went home at thanksgiving with an entreaty to my mom that she donate it to the local yeshiva.  Mother knows best, so she saved it for me for almost 20 years before its assigned donation.

At Cornell, as I prepared to begin my studies as a medical and scientific illustrator, the first thing I discovered was that I had to take the full curriculum of a pre-med major.  The second was that it was harder to get into this field than it was to become a doctor, with only two slots each available at John Hopkins and University of Rochester the premier east coast institutions.  The third and most alarming was that I was in a class of 25 female fine arts majors, all of whom seemed to have gone to the High School of Music and Fine Arts in Manhattan.  Worse yet Picasso and cubism had not reached New Jersey whereas all these young women seemed to know the subtleties of multiple eye levels, multiple points of view, the difference in time of observation and how all these were factored in to make a work of art.  I was the best artist in high school because I could portray things as they reflected light.  This ability was immediately discarded.  I considered myself a virtuoso draftsman having fallen in love with the etchings and engravings of Van Dyke, Rembrant and Durer and done my best to emulate them and assume their mantle. When I showed my high school work to Professor Evett, he remarked with a sigh, “line for line’s sake, not line for a tone”.  I was so unaware and so intimidated that I never thought to ask about Picasso and other 20th century greats as well as those heroes of my growing up who discarded this injunction.  This all was brought home to me in my first marking period when I received a 70 in painting and a 72 in drawing.  I should remark this was the 50’s and that the highest mark in either of these classes was an 83.  All but convinced of my complete lack of talent I sought solace with undergraduate architects with whom I shared the same college.  I soon learned architecture was a messianic profession in which the acolytes were locked up with the order’s mad monks who taught the curriculum.  The department was highly competitive, had a confounding esprit de corps as it prepared to save the world through architecture.  Given the contrast, the fine art department began to look very meager and unfocused

I had already learned quite a few things at Cornell.  One of the first was that I should have a Zippo.  I arrived at school on Friday, bought a pack of cigarettes on Sunday, then a carton on Tuesday.  Within a week I had my Zippo, and was painfully aware of my lack of sophistication as well as the benighted purchases I had made in preparation for college. Just how much became apparent as I soon realized I was involved with a new class of people with a different set of values.  This overwhelmed me as I now began considering architecture as a career.  I felt a magical new way of life and thinking was opened to me.  The very concept a world and a career based on aesthetics had never even remotely occurred  to me previously, sadly and certainly not as a fine arts major.  The world had recently emerged from a depression and a war and it was instilled into me that a career was one in which you could make a living.  Medicine and engineering were preferred.  All of my cousins were either engineers or physicists or mathematicians, areas in which I was not capable.  My mother had given me a great gift early on making her will clear in proposing that I was destined to be an artist.  Surely the family would be relieved that I had decided to transfer to architecture.

I remembered meeting a lovely man at the freshman reception, Professor John Hartell.  I arranged a meeting to discuss my situation with him.  Professor Hartell asked me why I wanted to transfer. ”Because I’m in a girls finishing school” I replied.  Unblinking, the good professor only smiled as he helped me transfer departments.  Little did I realize at that time that he was chairman of the girl’s finishing school, and that 25 years later it would be my turn.  And so it was that I entered the field of architecture.  As we go hurtling through the cosmos in our baseball caps and pick-up trucks I still count my blessings.

The Fine Arts major had seemed amorphous and waylaid by  European masters.  I was now entering a field with clear goals though at the time I was totally unaware that it also had been completely waylaid by the Bauhaus, our European masters.  Our Bach, Beethoven and Brahms was Mies, Corbu and Frank Lloyd. (Note,  one name does not fit). Yet, trying to work in the tradition of that hopeless,  romantic would soon find you out of the program.  The unwritten, the unspoken too American.   Years later, I realized Wright’s work was personal and complete.  That in all probability he could only have imitators.  Too hard to build on.  Akin to painting sunflowers after Van Gogh.  The curriculum was vigorous and comprehensive with little time left for other disciplines.  This served us well in that the other disciplines were to be subservient anyway.  Within a year we were all dedicated disciples for architecture was the glory of all disciplines.  Probably nothing exceptional here other than we had all become heroic sheep.  As in any orthodoxy there was no room for self doubt only for our mutual self esteem.  Even as undergraduates we had learned to bequeath condescension.  But then again who has not met an orthodox person?

What I did learn and learn thoroughly were the elements of design.  Our Bauhaus mentors made it appear that every design decision was a rational one.  It took us all years to appreciate that the rational is not the only driving force in art or architecture.  Perhaps the capricious is.  If we tried to introduce a diagonal into our work or even wink at Frank Lloyd Wright trouble would wink right back at us.  Somehow, this all seemed logical to us.  Throughout my undergraduate career I failed to be aware of just how much I had walked on the edge.  At the time I was pleased that teachers and students alike seemed curious as to what my design solutions would be, what my scale figures would look like as well as the accompanying foliage.  It never occurred to me that in being different I was also being irrational. Even then I was drawn by a force that didn’t seem to drive me to make work that was better than my cohorts but rather work that was different.  Different work cannot be compared, only contrasted.   A retrospective glance advises me that I was one lucky eccentric.  Perhaps my trafficking in ambiguity had already served me well. 

The line I employed both in drafting and in sketching was recognized as exceptional and already as a sophomore I was asked by seniors doing their thesis to do the trees, the stone work, the scale figures and etc.  This was indeed an honor.  Regaining some confidence I decided to take some painting courses in the fine arts department.  When I showed my architectural drawings the art professors were intrigued and wanted me to draw rather than paint in their classes.  Being liberated from synthetic cubism,  I now received A’s from the very men who had given me D’s.  The fine arts women now suddenly admired the new work.  This was something to capitalize on.

The next five years in earning a Bachelor of Art degree were pivotal in my life as they set me on a course which would endure until this very writing.  Though time aplenty was spent in undergraduate pursuits of adventure the majority of the time was intellectually vigorous and stimulating forcing us all to concentrate on aesthetics it’s history and evolution as it applied to our chosen field.  We were indeed young Gods.  Throughout the campus we were notorious as the lights in our studios never went out.  When the guards locked the buildings we hid in closets so we could resume our Godly work when they departed.  Design was highly competitive and all consuming in a way that fine arts never had been.  It was in this department that passion for art thoroughly saturated my very being with the art of architecture the very pinnacle.   Throughout this period I continued to take art courses and continued to get A’s.  Art had become recreation. 

Years later I realized that one of the important components of my education was my peer group.  They were remarkably bright and by and large very sharing colleagues.  Many developed successful practices and two became famous ( Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier).  It’s good to have excellent professors but better yet to have excellent classmates.   Of significant importance at this time was a three year sequence of the history of architecture and fine arts.  Somehow in a subtle manner all but unremarked by me at the time I was getting an extensive education in the fine arts as well.  It was only after this course that I got to be thinking of Giotto.  In my freshman year I had asked a fine arts professor who were the greatest artists who had ever lived.  Professor Hansen immediately responded Giotto.  If he said so that was OK with me.

 On my next trip to the Metropolitan I asked to see the Giotto’s.   A puzzled guard took me to a curator who advised me my wishes would be best realized with a trip to Italy.  It was several years of studying architecture before I became overwhelmed with the art of Giotto.  Who could so beautifully and inventively organize a rectangle, endless rectangles, as beautifully as Giotto.  Years later I decided only Picasso.  As far as a masters of invention they occupy the summit.  When I looked at a pair of eyes in a Giotto I was immediately directed towards another set then yet another as I was subtly and brilliantly transported throughout the composition, a happy pinball in a magical pinball machine.  When I finally got to Padua and Assisi to actually see the works I almost reacted as Berenson would to a Raphael minus the trembling. I still don’t understand how an artist could be so complete. 

My summers were spent working in an architectural office in Manhattan.  I now knew what sort of suit to wear and what stripe of tie to adorn it with.  My first and only significant job was with Armand Bartos, a member of the Gottesman family, which funded the Dead Sea Scroll Museum in Jerusalem. We were designing the World House Gallery in Manhattan with the world-renowned conceptual architect Friedrich Kiesler.  This creator of the endless house was some four feet ten inches tall, endlessly full of European charm and unable to read a blueprint.  I sense there must be a lesson here. 

In my last semester at Cornell I learned my father was incurably ill with Leukemia.  The head of the department convinced me that I should not drop out of school but do my best to finish the thesis.  This was a difficult decision as I was both heartbroken and terrified.  Soon I would be the head of the family with more responsibility that I felt I could possibly manage.  My thesis was an American Embassy for Jerusalem.  This though the State Department advised me they would not build in Jerusalem. The thesis was to be as realistic as possible.  My inspiration was the Doge’s Palace.  The building was made from the obligatory pink marble that Jerusalem requires.  Graduating Cornell and feeling burdened with overwhelming concerns I still managed to look forward to my next step as a great adventure as I prepared to move to Manhattan. 

Arriving in Manhattan I immediately began interviewing for jobs.  A design teacher had told me that Raymond Loewy Inc., where he had worked had remarkably tall secretaries and allowed you to take as many art supplies as you wanted.  What we’re talking here is Windsor Newton, Kolinsky sable and etc.  This was my first interview and it was successful.  The description had been accurate and I happily settled in.  They had just moved into new quarters on Park Avenue and Mr. Loewy himself picked a drawing from my portfolio to be the cartoon for a mural at the entrance. Thoroughly flattered I executed this work of the Trojan horse who when completed stood some seven feet tall.  It proved a great success until it was scraped off the wall some six years later.  I never really belonged at the firm but loved being there.  We designed stores and well as store interiors.  I designed murals, fixtures and floor plans.  It wasn’t really my idea of architecture.  I knew I wouldn’t want to be there too long.

My father was in the V.A. hospital on 23rd Street.  I visited him every day after work.  As his condition began to precipitously decline, my interest in work declined correspondingly.  My father never once complained of his destiny, only bemoaning what would become of his wife and daughter.  I did my best to reassure him that he could count on me, that I would never let our family down.  My father died in the summer of that year.  Never once did I hear him supplicate God or call on him in any way.  This has always remained with me.  I called my mom, my relatives in New York and boarded a bus to New Jersey to bury my dad.   Shortly afterwards Raymond Loewy and I went our separate ways.

My mother finally sold our farm to a shopping center.  Though I had been helping to support the family my mother was now in the main self-sufficient.  I was then working for an architect who was running out of work and doing his best to keep us all busy.  This was very unpleasant.   My father had enlisted in the medical corps during the First World War.  That he had done this as a proud immigrant after graduating Cornell had always been an impressive act in my mind.  Bored at work and with a sense of patriotism blossoming, I decided to enlist.  The problem was nothing was happening.  The Berlin crisis was yet a year away.  I didn’t want to waste two years sitting on a base somewhere, so I joined the National Guard and awaited orders.

While waiting for orders my friend Richard Meier called and asked if I would help the firm where he worked to finish up a competition project, which was nearing the deadline.  Having no idea when the National Guard would finally call, I joined Richard and began work on the competition for the Toronto City Hall at the firm of Davis Brody and Wisniewski Architects. It proved to be a relationship that would last some seven years.

Finally the Guard called me up.  Fort Dix beckoned and I was off to basic training.  The following sixth months were among the best in my life.  I had learned how to live successfully by my academic wits and artistic ability but never by my every-day wits.  I was soon to learn how to be cunning, deceptive, marginally a liar as well as to become a rather soldier- like physical specimen.  I could do over a dozen chins unheard of in the Blum family.

The six months concluded, a slimmed down version of me returned to the city to the same firm where I continued to work for some seven years.  The firm produced excellent designs and was highly published though in my tenure there it remained a small firm with only six draftsmen.  I gained a valuable insight here.  If you’re going to succeed in founding a fastidious design firm best to be born rich like Philip Johnson or marry a wealthy woman.  Two of the partners did while a third finally was forced to leave after more than a decade.  We concentrated on residences and religious building and finally got our first million-dollar building at SUNY Purchase after the firm had been around for over ten years.  I averaged a 65 hour work week there which is par for the course if anyone hopes to learn that professional trade.  The last building I worked on was a temple in Stanford Connecticut where I executed a mural on the high canopy over the torah scrolls.  Many years later I learned that this was Senator Joe Lieberman’s congregation.  Knowing what apparently appeals to God and those who congregate on his behalf, the mural was executed in 24 carat gold leaf.  It worked out well.

Towards the end of my stay at this firm I met my first wife Cecile.  Early on in the relationship I had told her it was my plan within a year to quit work and get an MFA at the University of Oregon where a friend of mine was teaching in the art department.  I explained that though architecture was my first love I had always wanted to try my hand at art thus having the best of both worlds.  The only way I foresaw of accomplishing this was to get a two year scholarship to sustain myself and begin the process. When we got serious Cecile advised me I didn’t have to go to school since she could sustain me and she could be the scholarship.  With the temple mural finished I left the firm. 

I still had a few ink and watercolors from Cornell as well as several more I had made during my seven years as an architect.  These in hand I set out for Madison Avenue to see if I could secure a gallery.  I have no idea how I had so much self confidence as to head into the street of dreams at that time other than my mother really loved me a lot.  Good fortune struck as the third or fourth gallery was much taken by my work and offered me a show within a year.  This was the Contempories Gallery across the street from Park Benet and the Staemphli and Sabarsky Gallery.   I felt I had struck the mother lode.  Among others the gallery represented Albers, De Creft and Marini.  I sold out my first show and several more.  The New York Times said that in many ways I was similar to Leon Bakst with a Babylonian vision.  I just happened to ask my mom “who was Leon Bakst”?  She replied “ a Jewish boy from Bialystok” 

Life being what it is and galleries being what they are, the Contempories Gallery closed.  Its owner Woodner having taken his seven year tax write-off closed the gallery.  He was an important figure in my life.  He was obsessed with beautiful drawings was an internationally known collector having many renaissance drawings in his office.  I was particularly taken by the half dozen Holbeins.  What gave me a sense of closeness was his being an architect as well as an artist.  One of his great loves was Redon as was mine. 

With the gallery closed on the advise of it’s director several of us moved a half a dozen blocks down Madison Avenue to the FAR Gallery.  Here I was in my element as the majority of its artists were either print makers or draftsmen.  At this point in my career I had yet to do an etching.  The gallery truly became a home for me.  They were successful with my work promoting it whenever possible.  One year I was the third show of the season following two extraordinary artists, Picasso and Manzu who were both showing etchings.  The Picasso show was over thirty prints from his 347 suite.  I was startled that Manzu’s beautiful etchings fully reverted back to the renaissance in both style and subject matter.  This Papal artist took little heed of the counter-reformation.  For the first time I started to seriously consider why I had chosen the themes I did.

I knew what was fashionable and that which was outré in the New York art world.  At the `time I was compared to Saul Steinberg, that was certainly good.  Yet, I realized though there were similarities in that he dealt with our foibles and mythologies he did so with contemporary images.  My concerns were parallel but my images were classical though we both confronted and commented on a world were there was a unicorn in the garden.

At about this time I met the art agent Ted Riley.  I met him through an acquaintance the architect Norton Juster who had spent much of his Prix de Rome time in writing the Phantom Tollbooth, which was to become a childrens classic. He had approached Ted for an illustrator Domenico Gnolli, the artist who was becoming internationally famous and represented by Ted.  It took me years and three shows to be accepted into the Riley stable  which included such artists as Jules Pfeiffer and Saul Steinberg.  I was in the best of company.   This introduction enabled me to do work for the New York Times Op-Ed page as well as the  Book Review.  It also gave me access to Limited Editions, the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers,  Pantheon and Steuben Glass, etc  I was very happy with these commissions as I felt that some of the best drawing was occurring in our newspapers and periodicals.  At the New York Times I was joining the likes of Alexander Calder.  I had never joined the ranks of those who were always worried about “high art” and “low art” for fear that the latter could catapult them into the seventh circle.  After all the parallel distinction between narrative art (renaissance) and commercial art is a matter of academic survival.  Only years later after receiving tenure at Cornell, long after the fact,  did I learn that some members of my evaluation committee expressed concern that I was drawing for the New York Times.  Curious places universities. 

Cecile and I now had three children, were living in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and were tiring a bit of city life.  We had both gone to Cornell, loved the landscape and the town and  were casting about for a place where our little kids might live for a while before returning for schooling in New York.  Decided to move to Ithaca for a few years.  We moved, soon bought an 1814 Federal style upstate colonial and life being what it is, divorced.  Though my career was now successful, I still needed a very reliable income to provide child support as well as to sustain myself.  It was thus that I became an academic.  Though I had always cherished the idea of being the only left handed second baseman in the majors, I had never even remotely desired to be a professor.  In many ways I never fit the mold for this profession but it proved to be a perfect one for me.  I did my best to be an apostate in this area though sadly I met with only modest success.  A career that would last 33 years and 66 semesters had now begun.

Never having taught before or even thought about it, I asked several senior professors if they could give me advice on teaching and the sort of curriculum they had developed.  They both thought this was exceedingly humorous and yet another piece of whimsy from their new colleague.  Why would they have hired me if they didn’t feel I  knew how to teach?  Post-haste, I decided to go along with my remarkable bit of humor.  I developed my own curriculum, realizing there would be a lot of ad-libbing along the way.  Happily I soon learned how easily I related to students.  With humor I was able to engage with the most challenging of students.  For those students who wanted a mystic for a teacher I was a profound disappointment.  Wit became important to my teaching.  Gradually I began thinking of myself as the art’s upstate Will Rogers.  Despite the  pitfalls in this approach it did serve me well throughout my teaching career.  Even my New Jersey vowels were found endearing.  I only taught drawing for it was the practice of the department to only teach what you did professionally.  This meant for some of the painting faculty that I was “the other” never an initiate, never truly admitted to the club and always suspect in graduate painting critiques.  Bailiwick defense is essential for academics.  Having worked for almost a decade as an architect, I was never able to fully understand these sheltered people.

I soon learned that I had power over young students which could easily be abused causing lasting damage.  I made a point of always being encouraging though hopefully never being false.   My attitude was -If you’re dumb enough to want to be an artist, I will support you in this passion as passion is our only real currency.  Some colleagues told their students that they had no talent and would never be successful.  This led me into quite a few heated arguments with these panjandrums who thought Adlai Stevenson would defeat Eisenhower and Cuomo, Pataki.

I had pretty well adjusted to my new life without children only seeing them 3 times a week and missing them very much.  The teaching was going well as I, now  young Turk, was confident at being one of the best teachers on the faculty.  I was exhibiting extensively which made me somewhat of a heroic figure to the students.  I came to a  point wherein you can easily believe how truly exceptional you are.  The fact that I was living in an isolated upstate academic community as a single man afforded me the final fillip on what was a fulfilling life.  This all ended one evening in the spring when a sheriff served me papers that my first wife was suing for custody. 

My lawyer told me that Cecile had played aces.  All I could do was play aces in return and sue for custody.  A court date was set.  Upon the lawyers recommendation I began rounding up character witnesses for myself and against Cecile.   When I arrived in court I had over 20 witnesses.  The startled judge strongly advocated our not going to trial but relying on the investigation of the probation department as by every indication the proceedings would be acrimonious and only harmful to the children.  After several months the report was returned in my favor.  I felt I had become sitcom dad at Sitcom University.

Though admired by the women of Ithaca for my actions in wanting to raise my children, after several years this turned to chagrin as I did not remarry thus providing my children with a proper upbringing.  My new life was both different and enjoyable.  Children are remarkable inventions.  The usual chores of keeping children engaged added to my teaching made for a very full day.  It was apparent I could no longer devote as much time to my art. 

Until this time I had built my career in producing some 35 ink and watercolors a year.  This meant I was doing two one man shows a year as well as work with my agent.  Doing originals requires large blocks of focused time.  So does raising children.  I found I could no longer do originals.  Just too many distractions.  A dear friend Steven Barbash, schooled by Peterdi at Yale, taught me the rudiments of etching.  Not only was it my salvation, it was also love at first sight.  At the time there were about twenty galleries in New York City that specialized in prints so it seemed like a rational decision.  Sadly after a little more than a decade the number was down to about four.  I was now able to produce a cartoon for the etching, transfer it and when I wasn’t driving to music lessons or scout meetings, avail myself of the free hour or two to work on the plate.  With the original thinking done the creative process continued at a much less consuming rate whenever free time appeared.

Life now proceeded at a fairly uneventful pace.  The teaching went along easily even as I survived a term a chairman which enabled me to get tenure. It is invaluable to do something akin to a chairmanship. No matter what my decisions half the faculty thought I was saintly and the other half benighted.  If you need to be beloved this is a bad situation.  My work continued at a diminished rate though I was becoming ever more proficient at etching,  a sometimes slow and  cumbersome process.   After all the meticulous work on the plate itself it was exhilarating to spend a physical day working the press and making the prints.  Getting older and no longer living in the city, slowly I lost my New York contacts and found that showing there was getting difficult.  During this extended period my children were growing up, finishing high school and attending college.  On one of my Sabbatics, which I spent in Italy, I met and married an interim Italian wife.

Had I been privileged to go to Italy earlier I believe my life as an artist would have taken a somewhat different tack.  I learned, that far from rational, art is deeply capricious.  Decisions but a whim, except for the first one that sets a standard.   That unless you’re doing pharaoh’s or God’s work, nothing has to be symmetrical.  America soon picked up on this as formality became established in our way of designing “important” buildings.  It took a robust and vulgar America in the twentieth century to lead us away from this ineluctable conclusion.  As I look back on my architectural education it becomes clear that we were shortchanged, that our national identity was subsumed to that of Europes’.  All this while acknowledging  that my essence as an artist is European. 

Academic life continued in this vein.  My second wife and I divorced.  On a whim I attended my 40th high school reunion, remarking to my friends that it was time to check out the majorettes and cheerleaders and see how they were faring.  This chauvinist bravado  sent me to the reunion where I met Barbara, a cheerleader who had fared remarkably well.  It wasn’t too long before we were engaged and married.  Life now proceeded happily and peacefully with my children graduated and gone and the teaching becoming routine.  I continued to work and exhibit now exclusively producing etchings.  I only began water coloring them after a decade of experimenting.  Some felt I had betrayed the art of etching by water coloring them while others felt they only now for the first time understood the imagery.  On balance this seemed balanced. 

Having passed 65, with retirement beckoning, we decided that we would eventually move to California where my children had settled and where Barbara’s children had long resided.  She was a transplanted east coast person who’s heart belonged to the west.

So it was that I reluctantly left an idyllic Ithaca NY and moved to the heart of middle America in Stockton California.  I soon felt like Solzenitzn except that I was living in interior exile in Stockton.  A liberal college community had not prepared  me for the minions of Fox News.  For the first time I realized how completely politically illiterate we Americans can be.  Shy by nature and failing to find  spiritual colleagues, I retreated to my garage which I had converted to a very large studio.  This all proved to be to the good as out of self preservation I devoted myself fully to making art for the first time in my life.  I felt at a far remove from the east coast and the art world.  The saving grace is that I had made contact with the Pucker Gallery in Boston before my move.  The connection was fortuitous as it was the result of a former student who thought they might be interested in my wor

In the five years I have been in Stockton my work has been focused on the shows I have had at this gallery.  Getting older and being an artist gets you both sides of the coin.  Technique and creativity begin to recede while in your mind a now wiser intelligence presides. 

I have endeavored to give you a brief sense of my life with whatever insights they might provide. I will now be embarking on that part of my biography that has me the most concerned- 

My Art

In the beginning as I transitioned to a precocious toddler (every toddler’s destiny)  I made my first observations of the world I found myself in.  I did this with an idea, a pencil and a piece of paper.  Looking back on these drawings God only knows what they meant but they were a form of magic and in their infallibility they never required an erasure mark.  Matisse said he always liked to paint like a child and Mark Twain probably said, every  child is a genius until he’s ten.  Sustaining this ability to invent and be amazed is bequeathed to very few of us.  Much in the same way as a prophet receives the word of God.   This search and its format have remained a constant in my life.  The only difference now is that I have an idea, a metal plate and a stylus.  I have always tried to keep things simple.  Mine has never been a search for exotic complicated or esoteric etching techniques.  The work is rather straight forward and in some ways can be considered very elementary.  The viewer may feel it is complicated because there are so many details but in the field it is known as repetition of motif which serves to make the image easier to design as well as easier to comprehend.  I’ve always been fascinated by artists such as Holbein and the Flemish who could put in and orchestrate so much detail in a single work of art.  There is nothing more magical than a black and white image.  It is the most cerebral way of working since illusion is an easy seduction and never fully available to the artist.  The whites can go either positive or negative as can the blacks, a tool that can be employed to great advantage to evoke the mysteries of space and the ambiguity of the images. 

What I read becomes visual and what I see becomes even more visual, sometimes even with a circumscribed rectangle.  The other day C-Span carried the Punch and Blankfein show in which a committee of highly righteous senate munchkins berated a bevy of sleek Goldman brunettes.  This was followed by the Blankfein himself, a man typecast from a Cruikshank drawing.  The curtain closed as all the guilty parties on both sides retreated to their usual guilty ways.  Old age has not brought me clarity, only chaos.  I realize this is how I began to observe the world with everything seeming a bit off, a parody and funny on its often ugly face.   When I was a child if cancer occurred within the family it was referenced only in French, German or Russian.  The “C” word could not be spoken.  This I realized was by design.  If the design is culturally right you could say or do almost anything.  Killing is culturally acceptable my Bible so it must be culturally right for me.  Killing is culturally right in pretty much all the God pantheons, so if it’s culturally right for all these Gods it must be culturally right for pretty much all of us.  Surrounded as I was as a child by all this cultural rightness can it be no wonder that I was so attracted to killing and soldiers and the conquerors who led them.  Schools sought to reinforce this, bestowing upon the young heroes such as Caesar, Alexander and David.  If however, a great killer was of another color that was another story.  Such a man would not lead soldiers, he would lead hordes.   These among many other mixed messages saturated my childhood.  Early on my search was for the mythic. Probably true of all children, which is why dinosaurs are so beloved for in a childs eyes could they ever have existed? Unlike many other children I never stopped drawing, which meant I never stopped worrying about these things.

The issue became how could I reconcile these contradictions, which only became more profound as I grew older.  They could not be reconciled in architecture, though art was becoming a perfect vehicle.  A picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes a picture is worth a thousand pictures.  A search for the latter has always been the driving force.  Maybe you can be an average accountant or lawyer but that doesn’t work for an artist.  An artist is a truth teller even as the truth told varies radically from artist to artist, century to century.  The truth is that we all live with our absurd understanding of life as we deal with a benighted sense of our history and a prejudiced history of our warring Gods.  Best to acknowledge this even as we hope for continued blue skies.   How does one make sense of this visually?

Best to examine our most important myths, religions, historical events and philosophies which have so permeated our lives.  Try as I might I could only see a history where all too often absurd constructs of generated horrible events.  You may notice the word absurd is now appearing in many iterations.  Best to confess now I have lived my life as an absurdist.  Thinking of myself as well educated both in history and in art I somehow feel the need to cloak this sensibility in a Brooks Bros. suit which allows me to comment on our many accepted grotesqueries  in an ambiguous and often charming portrayal.  The more unclear the view the more the viewer understands my narrative.  Being well tailored means well designed both in terms of imagery as well as composition, with nothing overwrought or polemical. 

My most influential teacher, Norman Daly, trained me in the art of tripartite  composition used so extensively in the renaissance and baroque periods. This device serves to powerfully organize a rectangle and place attention where required as it advises the eye to assess the rectangle as  to fully experience its universe.  The rectangle being the universe of both the viewer and the artist.  Both Picasso and Matisse are masters of this organizational system. They both understood it must become second nature and never formulaic.  I was taught that illusionistic depth was not the way to deal with the twentieth century rectangle, that linear prospective was out. That a rectangle was a two dimensional creation, whose integrity must be maintained much as the Egyptians did. That shapes push against each other laterally in definite cadences with some shapes coming forward while others recede.  All of this in a non rational way in that Euclidian geometry is not present.  To this day breaking away from flat pattern design is something I can only do in a self conscious and constrained way.  My early teachers left too great an imprint. 

I know I’m not an American artist.  I know I’m a muddled north European artist.  Mine is not the hedonistic world of the south but rather the severe world of the north, leavened by my world view which is distinctly more optimistic than theirs.  I do believe the north had the accurate view.  Were I to do a crucifixion, it would not be the death as an erotic act portrayal envisioned by the Italians but rather the somber and terrifying portrayal of the Germans.  True of much German art, Line carries the day as it does for me in my work.  It is line that defines the volumes and escorts the eye.  My line lacks the bite of the German as it often falls victim to my love of art nouveau.   I will analogize this.   Examine and contrast both German and American art  in their expression of eroticism and war.  If you look at Marlene Dietrich, a reigning beauty of her day and analyze her design we see sharp angles connecting sinuous curves, not a circular curve in sight.  Even the head is composed of angles.  Everything is taut.   Then we have Marilyn Monroe, an endless series of uncompromising, unstopping circular rhythms right up to her head, hair and hair-do.  Curves, curves, curves.  Both women are triumphs of sensuality even as they are triumphs of different designs.   The German Luger pistol looks angular, mean, lethal and poisonous.  It even looks capable of injecting poison.   The American 45 with its soft curves looks like it could shoot amiable mud balls.  The German helmet is much like Marlene, tight almost straight lines connected by taut curves whereas the American helmet would look good on Homer Simpson.   Historically I would connect Cranach’s Eve, his ideal woman, with Marlene.   America was too young and too prudish in its early days for me to be able to make a similar connection.   The same connection could be made of the Tiger tank, the eighty millimeter anti tank gun vis a vis our Sherman tank and howitzer.  For the German there is no denial of the intent and meaning of the war item they designed.  In America, which designed baseball you have your own way of expressing war which is much more good natured as it traffics in ambiguity.  Caught between two worlds, I didn’t split the difference.   Ambiguity bites.

Giotto (who I referenced earlier)  the early 14th century Italian,  not yet tainted by renaissance imagery, had immense bite as well as a profound humanity which he harnessed in the most masterful of two dimensional compositions even as he incorporated a limited flattened space into his work.  Perhaps Giotto was fortunate to work in a time when mathematical perspective had not yet come into being.

I have not lived in a time of bibles, pharaohs, great popes, or major advances in humanistic philosophy.  I grew up in a time of the great depression, a world conflagration and genocides.  And now in my old age a time of planetary threats.  This while living in the wealthiest most hedonistic nation the world has ever seen, a nation seemingly self entitled to much more than it’s share of the earth’s bounty.  All of the inequities and calamities that have occurred  mere, abstractions.   I have  lived in comfort and with a   sense of guilt that has been catered to and assuaged in the knowledge that I am a  liberal.  Often times life seems to me an incomprehensible fairy tale universal in scale.  Some of the tales are horrible, some appear whimsical and all too many seem to signify nothing that I can understand.   How does one deal with such a world?  Perhaps Faberge` knew.