And essay on how it all started… Pt1

Room 233, St Mary’s Hall at Villanova.
St Mary’s was an interesting building. I had been assigned there as a freshman in September 1977. I was 17 and about as emotionally unprepared for college as one could get. The building was huge, a nearly 1/8 mile long. It was a wholly contained institution complete with 240 rooms, a pool, a theatre, a gym and weight room, and the finest cafeteria on campus. It also contained the entire college of nursing and a chapel, which was actually the size of a small gothic cathedral. I loved the pipe organ. The place had been built as a Seminary in the mid 1960’s when the Augustinian order saw a massive surge in interest in young men seeking to join the priesthood. Funny how that surge quickly dried up when the Vietnam war and the draft ended. I hated the place my first month of freshman year, it off the main campus, literally on the other side of the tracks. It had little crosses etched into the staircase walls and a multitude of 1960’s stained glass that were of limited artistic credit. However, it didn’t take me long to begin to appreciate the quite, thick walls, the convenience of a sink in each room, and all those nursing students who were actually pleasant to even us freshman. Clearly they were practicing compassion.

By junior year I had scored a single room down the hall from the extensive freshman wing, where we had been packed in on bunk beds. I was still on the 2nd floor, which meant ceilings high enough that I could build a loft, essentially raising the bed to the ceiling level and creating a reasonable living space down below. I had a few tool, borrowed a few more and headed down to scour the sub-basement of the building for material to “recycle” (a relatively new concept back then). As it would turn out, some recently graduated student had left behind a small mountain of lumber, much of it precut to the exact size I needed. After a few trips up and down the many stairs and a few hour building, the build was complete and I was ready to decorate,

Dorm room decor of the day was not much different that it is today, posters, flags, album cover art, etc. I was not going to put up a Farah Faucet poster, that just wasn’t me. Not that I was a particular fan of his music, but I did have a poster of Beethoven up. I was now an upper classman, and that meant as certain faux sophistication on display was justified. But I needed something on the other wall, and so I joined my peers looked to my record collection for inspiration.

I had just spent my third of five summers at Streeter, one of two municipal swimming pools In Morris Township. I had worked my way up to the best possible job that an overweight, easily sunburned teenager could ever have….   Pool Maintenance guy. Better hours and pay than the guards, and total autonomy as to how and when I did things done, all while enjoying the benefits of working around college girls in bathing suits. The down side was having to deal with a filter system that used chlorine in the gas form. The extent of my safety training was this statement from the town engineer, “if you think it’s leaking out of control, hold your breath while you get it shut off and then run the hell out of there”. To this day, the only ambulance ride I’ve ever had was a result of a chlorine tank leak the following summer. At the hospital I was given a few hours of oxygen and then sent home. I was “given” the next day off.  Fortunately, that system has long since been replaced, but when I think back on it, oh the lawyers that could have, maybe should have, been involved.

But during that summer of ’79, I was having a rather enjoyable time. While I was mostly checking out the girls, I would also spend time cutting the grass, weeding the flower beds, and repainting the benches. Having pre-planned my dorm-decorating project, I took the liberty of collecting a small jar of each color I was working with. They had great, lame names like Canary Yellow, Fence-Post Brown and Postal Blue. Those colors became my first pallet.

In my first days back at Villanova that September, I declared his major as economics, surprised my family by signing up to take a minor in religious studies, and built that loft. Ready to decorate, I got a roll of masking tape and decided I was going to do as so many others had in dorm rooms around the country: Recreate that ubiquitous 70’s Pink Floyd icon, the “Dark Side of the Moon” prism.

And that’s when it happened. It was literally in that moment, with a brush full of paint and a white wall in front of me, I changed. My mind connected with my hand, and images and color began take up that wall. Over a couple of hours I cover that wall and covered it again, first with color, then with more color and line drawings and simple images. I painted and drew the familiar and the abstract, and then changed it and change it again. I never finished the prism, but that didn’t matter. That day stopped being about décor, and forever became about me painting. What I was painting was secondary to the fact that I was painting. Maybe it was the mixing of colors, trying different brush strokes, or creating stencils, but I had somehow found myself in that process. Painting somehow, lifted me. Over the next few days, I covered several walls, in my room and others. I painted landscapes, abstracts, floating fruit and flying pianos. I painted until I ran out of paint, which was lucky because I need to start school. It had started so innocently, but that experience changed me.

Over the course of the next 15 months, I dabbled in my new found passion when and where I could. I began taking the arts seriously, aggressively visiting art museums and galleries’ in New York and Philadelphia. I did what I could to learn about paint, paper, brushes and canvas. I experimented with sketching and using watercolors. I drove a 1966 Volkswagen that I did had to do body and engine work on, learning how wonderfully fine was the line between industrial and fine art. I made the move off of walls and started doing works on paper and packing board.

Slalom, 1980 20×24

I purchased my first real canvas and brushes at an art store in Ardmore PA, and did what I consider my first “real” painting. I called it “Slalom”. I was a happy image that was inspired by the sadness that I felt not having the money for a weekend ski trip that several friends had gone on. I completed it there in room 233 on Dec. 8, 1980. Later that evening comes the news of the death of John Lennon, and I was somehow changed again. Now painting wasn’t just going to be about personal satisfaction, but rather I knew then that it had to be about finding a voice for myself. If I couldn’t be confident in what I had to say, maybe I could find confidence in what I could show. Whether of not I could be called an artist from that moment on I do not know. But from that moment on, I understood what it meant to be an artist. An Artist must express something of value, whether through words, music or images.  Upon that realization, my journey began.

Next installment: Painting Class, Utrechts, and the job market for 1981 Grads.