For the first decade, I painted always from life: landscape, still life, figure. Comprehending the nature makes me conscious, and I learn.
This began with Phil Malicoat, one of several teachers in Provincetown who ran their own small school. He and Edwin Dickinson (whose widow was in my reading group), had been students of Charles Hawthortne, who had attracted them all to Cape Cod. Hawthorne’s teacher had been William Merritt Chase, who had spent some years among the French Impressionists. This direct legacy, I later found out when I went to art school, is rare. What I learned from them informs the way I teach. During those years, I worked exclusively in natural light, which is alive and constantly changing.
At The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, we spent 40 plus hours a week working primarily from live models, and developed stamina. At the Studio School, students took turns cooking lunch for the entire school. We all were given keys to the building at 8 West 8th Street, so we could work any time. A few people had no other home and slept there. It was full immersion. I learned to draw and to think about art. We enjoyed history lessons, critiques and conversations with contemporary artists and critics and art historians working in the city at that time, the 1980’s.
Later I spent a year with Antonio Romano learning Renaissance techniques of buon fresco. He had grown up thinking the Etruscans were people who lived underground and pushed up things they made during the night. We worked from the notebooks of Cennino Cennini. Antonio also ran an Italian café with a grape festooned garden a couple of blocks away, because he believed it was necessary for artists to have a place like this to spend hours together, even if they only bought one espresso. New York rents put an end to that.
With playwright and director Misha Shulman, I collaborated on ‘Desert Sunrise’ at Theatre for the New City, interpreting scenes, designing sets and costumes, with an international cast.
In Rome, where I lived for a decade, I studied with a portrait teacher, a clay sculpture teacher, and became inspired by narrative images. I painted a modern icon of Our Lady of the Desert and gave it to the Benedictine nuns who live in the four corners area of NM. In Italy, everyone wants to exhibit your work, or publish your book, and listen to you talk about it. They follow what you are saying, and ask good questions. I had the opportunity to present a work at one of the collateral galleries during the Venice Biennale. Nobody makes any money. Museum shows offer few, if any, of the artist’s most famous works, but they contextualize well with drawings, letters, contemporaneous work.
In Turkey, where I earned an MA in International Peace and Conflict Studies, I wrote my these about the role of the arts in Negative Peace and Conflict Environments, focusing on theatre. These days, I reflect on the future, and how I can contribute with my art and my life.