Bio

As far back as I can remember, I always had an aptitude for drawing things that interested me. Even as a youngster, attracted to the comic books of the day – Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and so on – my earliest drawings were copies of images that I had seen in the comics.

Once I got into high school, I had the opportunity to take art classes, and tried my hand at drawing, ceramics and sculpture and even made some rudimentary furniture.

The summer after high school graduation, I was working in a machine shop, running lathes and making tiny metal parts that would be used in aircraft switching systems. I was making very good money for a high school graduate, and had no real thought about attending college. But by the end of that summer, most of my friends had already enrolled in college, and I thought I’d give it a shot to see what it was all about. So I enrolled as a non-matriculant in Mercer County College, and – based on my interest in drawing and visual arts – I signed up for some classes in advertising design.

I did pretty well in my graphic and advertising design courses, which also included some life drawing courses in which I also did well. It was around this time that I became exposed to the College’s fine arts programs. One of my teachers, Mel Leipzig, provided me with a point of entry into the work of contemporary realist artists — folks like Philip Pearlstein, Jack Beal, Neil Welliver, Al Leslie and others. Prior to that, my only experience with figurative painting was limited to the kinds of historical works found in museums. Seeing representational painting done with a contemporary flavor piqued my interest, and set me on a course that was to remain with me for the rest of my life.

One of the required courses was an introduction to printmaking, covering things like woodcut, screen printing, etching, mono prints, and more. I had done pretty well in my graphic and advertising design courses, which also included some life drawing courses. Coupled with my interest in drawing the figure, I saw printmaking as an extension of the work I had been doing in graphic design, and I began trying my hand at various types of printmaking, including wood, cut, and silkscreen printing. 

There was something particularly interesting about screen printing, especially the process… the creation of stencils and the additive process of incorporating colors into a composition. It was a way of combining the compositional elements of drawing and design with the process of reducing the composition to its most basic elements, and cutting-out the stencils that could be used for each addition of color. 

It intrigued me enough that I set up a screen printing operation in my parents’ basement, so that I could work on my prints whenever the spirit moved me. I wound up doing several different prints, each of them more complex, and incorporating more colors than the previous, just to challenge myself.

Soon after, I was exposed to etching and engraving, and in particular, aquatint. Once again, this was a medium that allowed me to incorporate both my sense of composition and drawing with another fairly elaborate process. Working with polished zinc plates, rosin, spray paint, a masking agent,  nitric acid, and printing ink, I was able to create wide areas of varying tonality that could be used to define space in my compositions. 

This became a primary focus of mine for the next year or two as I produced numerous etchings, each more complex than the previous one. At one point, I even began work on a multicolored etching that involve the use of a different zinc plate for each color. Unfortunately, I was never able to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, and only a single unfinished proof print exists.

As I became more confident in my drawing and compositional ability, I decided it was finally time to tackle painting… Something that I approached with great trepidation. 

More to come…