Introduction
If someone had asked me when I was five what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d have known the answer. From infancy, I’d listened to my mother read to me daily, most often the children’s literature contained in the pages of the set of Childcraft books we owned. I was amazed how those little bugs on the page—words—could open up whole worlds inside my head, and I realized that I wanted to do that for other people. So by age five, I knew I wanted to be a writer.
I never wanted to be an artist, never thought of being an artist, though, sure, artists were cool. When I was young, I had three primary images of artists. One was of the illustrators and painters whose work liberally salted the pages of the books my mother read to me, embellishing and helping give flavor and life to the stories and poems. The second was of comic book and Sunday funny page illustrators—and let’s not forget the sharply observant contributors to Mad Magazine. I’d also have to include the work of William Steig, whose little book of interesting drawings, The Lonely Ones, was in my parents’ library and is now in mine. I looked at it often and was always intrigued. The third was of beatniks—Go Man Van Gogh from the Beany and Cecil cartoon series created by Bob Clampett, to be specific. And there was Jon Gnagy, host of TV’s first how-to art program, which I watched with fascination. In addition, my parents had several artworks in our house, including a life-size reproduction of one of the sunflower paintings by the real Van Gogh—Vincent, that is—and I loved its vibrancy and life.
So while the idea of being a writer remained paramount, art wasn’t even on my personal horizon. But as I struggled through high school and embarked on my freshman year at college, I realized I knew only one thing for certain: I didn’t know enough to be a writer.
Gaining more knowledge would take time, but in the interim, I still had the impulse to create, and by now, the images of the artists of my childhood had been enriched by multiple hippie artists whose work was all around me in counter-culture magazines like Eye, Avant-Garde, and Rolling Stone; on the posters that proliferated from the late 1960s to the early-to-mid 1970s; and in the underground comix that replaced the comic books of my early years. Even mainstream magazines, such as Life, Look, and Psychology Today, contained interesting images. I started dabbling in art, figuring I could blow off some creative steam, so to speak, while I grew older and, hopefully, gained enough skill and knowledge to actually write something worth reading.
I began making art when I was nineteen. I never had formal training in art, and I never learned to draw, but I seemed to have an impulse to create, so that’s what I did. And very quickly my art horizons were widened by the introduction into hippie culture of work from artists of the recent past that resonated with the counterculture ethos and that was being published in relatively inexpensive coffee-table books. Principal among them were the Surrealists, M.C. Escher, and Pop artists.
So I began making art, not because I thought it would go anywhere or lead to anything, but because, training or not, I liked doing it. It gave me a creative outlet that writing could not yet provide, and I kept at it because, unlike writing, it was relatively angst free. I never had any illusion that art would be my career, so I never experienced the trepidations I felt while considering my budding but, at the time, non-existent writing career.
I’ve detailed my writing career, among other matters, in my memoir, Living the Story, but as I approach the end of life and look back, I realize how important making art has been to me—just as important, it turns out, as my writing. So I decided to make this website (and a book) featuring some of what I created over a span of more than fifty years, though the middle of that time was occupied by a very long hiatus.
As with writing, art presents some hard problems, especially for those of us who face limitations. I mentioned before that I never learned to draw. Perhaps I could have learned, but the desire to draw did not come naturally to me. I have read or seen documentaries about the lives of notable artists, and almost all of them exhibited a natural talent for drawing at an early age. I did not. Nor do I have the manual dexterity required. I simply do not have the hands for it. In my twenties, I tried playing the guitar, but musicians have long hands and long fingers, and I have square palms and clumsy fingers of only average length. I have paws rather than fine instruments. Luckily, my paws worked quite well with a typewriter, and even better with a computer keyboard, so it seemed that fate had decreed that my early impulse to be a writer was the correct one.
As I developed my writing skills, though, I kept creating art. It was an outlet and release unconnected to the rigors and demands of writing. The failures of writing. The difficulties of actually making a living at writing. I didn’t intend to make a living off of art. It was just something I did for personal pleasure and edification, so it remained free of the intellectual and emotional demands that made writing a challenging path to pursue.
My first art piece was painted with blacklight paint on the side of a simple plywood stand in my bedroom when I was a college sophomore in 1969. Consisting of psychedelic swirls and patterns, it was pretty crude, so thankfully, it no longer exists. As time went on, my pieces got better, but it was a long while before they were any good.
Heck, some of them still aren’t, but that’s the way with any art. Some of it gels, some of it doesn’t. I’ve left a number of pieces out of this catalog simply because they are inferior—either trivial or incompetently executed. My hands are clumsy, and I’ve never been a devoted craftsman with a facility for fine work. And I have a propensity for experimentation with materials and techniques that often leads me to shoot in the dark when I begin an artwork. Nevertheless, I have included a number of pieces in this catalog that might be considered inferior for one reason or another but that have some sort of meaning for me that transcends their poor execution. They might be bad, but I like them, so they’re here.
I’ve always been drawn to the art of collage and early on began making collages, struggling at first to find a good medium with which to construct them. I also was enamored of the Surrealists, and most of my early paintings were attempts to emulate them. But even Surrealistic painting requires the techniques of Realism, which I could not do, and that’s one reason I stopped attempting that, though certainly I would have gotten better at it over time had I continued. The other reason is more important: It was old ground already explored by the Surrealists, and even if I got to be decent at painting in that style, I was many decades too late. Besides, art was my playground, and I wanted to experiment and explore, not get tied to any one mode or style.
By now, my art world had opened up considerably. While I did not have any formal training in fine art techniques, I did have my own version of artistic training in the form of employment in the printing industry as a process cameraman and negative stripper—jobs that have essentially become extinct in the digital age. I worked at that for more than seven years, and after only two, I was placed in charge of the layout department of the printshop where I worked. I was not a graphic designer, but I helped translate graphic design into printed pieces, and that often required a certain amount of artistic input and the skill of a craftsman. I got to be pretty good at it, and in the process, I learned to be a decent layout artist—this was in the pre-digital days of layout boards, T-squares and rulers, blue pencils, waxers, and sheets of type from a typesetter.
This employment had several influences, not the least of which was that what I was doing was, in many ways, similar to my collage work, and the two resonated with each other with positive results. Second, the printshop I worked for developed a reputation for high-quality work, which brought us several long-term clients that fed directly into my artistic education. Foremost among them was Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, for which we printed the exhibition catalogs for several years. Two or three prominent art galleries also were regular clients, as were a couple of artists who had us reproduce their work as prints. In addition, we printed a few pieces for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, though that work was never regular. So I was getting exposed to some really great contemporary art as well as to the art establishment and art trends of the time.
Adding to this exposure was my growing library of art books, which had expanded beyond the Hippie-era collection of Surrealists, Escher, and the other artists who helped sparked my earliest motivations to make art. These books were my version of taking art history courses. And one in particular was my version of technical artistic training. That was The Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques, by Ralph Mayer, which I read cover-to-cover a couple of times and have referred to often.
The third influence provided by working in the printshop was that it opened up a new medium for me: film. By that, I do not mean conventional photography. My employment required the use of a process camera. This piece of equipment is now obsolete, just as much of the printing trade became following the advent of the personal computer and digital printing. A process camera is a large film camera that somewhat resembles those antique cameras with the black bellows that extends the lens out from the main body of the camera, only on a very large scale. A room-size scale. So large that the bellows of the camera cranks in and out on a track, and the film back opens inside the darkroom. This type of camera is designed to shoot film negatives of flat objects—type layouts, illustrations, and photographs—at nearly any practical scale for use in the printing process. In lieu of a lengthy description, I’m including photos of a camera similar to the one I used.
The main point is that I had ready access to film stock as large as 20"x24" and a decently outfitted darkroom. During my time at the printshop, I made around two hundred of what I call “film drawings,” using various chemicals and substances to create abstract patterns either directly on negative film stock, which I later printed on print paper, or directly on the print paper itself. Most of these are relatively small- to medium-sized. All this work was accomplished inside the darkroom. I have included about forty examples of film drawings in this website. Most are ones that would fit on my scanner, but many, as large as 12"x18", are not included. One exception is “The Plutonium Christian,” which is in the page titled "Early Work." In addition and much later, I used colored copies of a larger film drawing to create the four versions of “The 10,000 Things.” The two pieces in "Later Work" and titled “Landscape with Beast” are not film drawings, per se, but images of “The Beast,” a collage I did using discarded film drawings. The original of "The Beast" is in "Early Works." Two other collages created with film drawings are “The Magician” (2) and “Untitled” (11).
I was safely ensconced in the printshop and was making art at home, too, but I hadn’t forgotten my dream of being a writer. I was still writing, trying to improve my skills and the quality of the content, but by now I’d understood that being a writer was difficult and haphazard occupation. Precious few writers make it big, or even make a living at it, while the vast majority remain obscure and unemployed as writers. The only real writing jobs that paid a salary seemed to be those of reporter, advertising copywriter, or technical writer . I didn’t want to do any of those, though I ended up doing plenty of all three as my career progressed. When you work in a creative field, you sometimes have to do jobs that aren’t particularly rewarding.
In pondering my future, I came to realize that the publishing industry had one other writing-related job that companies actually paid salaries for, and that was editor. I figured that fewer writers would be trying for that career over the writerly life, so I decided to boost my writing career by becoming an editor.
Back then, many colleges offered creative writing courses, but only a few had degree programs for writing, and those mostly at the master’s level. To my knowledge, none offered courses in editing. And of course, nobody is going to hire a young tyro writer as an editor. But I thought I had a good avenue to approach the profession since I worked in a printshop and knew how to do layout and had the resources to shepherd a print project through the entire process. I would make my own magazine—Phosphene—to learn how to be an editor and show that I could do it. Once again, I was shooting in the dark, but at the time, there was nothing else to shoot at. Miraculously, though, I did hit something. Not long after I began publishing Phosphene, it came to attention of a fellow who owned a small regional publishing company that he was expanding. He needed help, and he hired me away from the printshop. I was happy to go since the new job was actually in the writing/editing field, even if at a low level.
My first daughter, Sydney, was born in 1983, and her sister, Mariko, came about a year-and-a-half later. The need to support them, combined with the new job and trying to kickstart an actual writing career, took up all my energies and time, and art fell by the wayside—a fallow period for art that lasted nearly three decades. But luckily, during the first dozen years of that time, I advanced my writing skills and credentials enough that, in 1994, I obtained a senior editorial position at Rice University in Houston, editing and writing for the university’s quarterly four-color magazine and doing the same for an incredible variety of printed materials for the university. A major perk of that job, aside from working alongside a clutch of talented writers, was working with a group of excellent and creative designers and photographers. While I might not have been actively doing art during that time, I learned a lot from them.
My wife, Julie, and I bought a large old house in southeast Houston, and we raised our daughters there and helped see them through college. I wanted to go back to art during those years, but the house we’d bought required major renovations, which took me twenty-five years to complete. Doing the renovations was like having a second job. I worked in the office every weekday then came home, ate, and worked on the house for several hours. Weekends were almost entirely devoted to renovations.
During that time, I did manage to resume my personal writing, but those efforts were sandwiched between major renovation projects while we got funding for them in place, and all of that left no time for art. Even if I’d had the time, I learned that the part of my brain that can conceive and hold plots or art images had become completely occupied by renovation plans and the few personal writing projects I managed to find time for. That house became almost my sole creative project, which ended only when we retired, sold the house in 2019, and moved out of Houston. After the initial period of moving to the new house, settling in, and fixing the several things that needed fixing, I suddenly found that I had both the time and brain power to devote to personal writing and, more to the point for this website, creating art.
I’ve divided this site into five sections of photos of most, though not all, of the art I created on canvas, plywood, masonite, and film. There is no clear defining break between the works depicted in Part 1: Early Work and Part 2: Second Period. In general, the former covers art created between about 1970 and 1978, and the latter covers art created between 1978 and 1983. Part 3: Interregnum, shows the scant few pieces I made during the long, long fallow period, and Part 4: Later Work, displays the art created since 2020. Part 5: Film Works, shows a sampling of some of my smaller film drawings.
I wish I’d kept better records of my early and middle work. I also wish I’d been more cautious about giving away pieces back then. I did that thinking that the recipients would appreciate the art, but truthfully, most of the pieces I gave away have probably been destroyed or cast aside. In fact, in compiling this catalog, I often found myself dismayed by how much of my art has vanished, either actually or seemingly. Even family and friends have treated it callously, and more than a few pieces have been destroyed by fire, flood, and the ravages of time.
It is upsetting, but such is life. Artistic types create then throw our creations into an uncaring world, and too often we witness our efforts ground to nothing by the sands of time even before we are. In some ways, that’s why I’m making this website—not because I think I’ve produced great art (though I think some of it’s pretty good), but because it’s one way to preserve it for myself. It’s a way of helping me assess my life and what it’s meant. Or seems to have meant. In the end, all I can say is that I hope you enjoy at least some of the art in these pages. I liked making it—even the mediocre pieces, though I might not have liked those so much when they were finished. When you shoot into the dark, you’re bound to hit things other than the target.
I guess I would be categorized as a folk artist, but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious about what I’m doing with art. Stylistically, I’m certainly no realist or strict representationalist. I find my art adheres to four major styles. My earlier, often incompetent, paintings are most obviously Surrealist, but I consider my collage work to be Surrealist, as well, if the definition of Surrealism means drawing images and ideas from the subconscious/unconscious. Or the ether. As I developed as an artist, my work expanded into Conceptual Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Abstract Representationalism. This last term describes a lot of what I’ve done, and I like it also because I coined the term—for myself, at least. After I thought of it, I did an internet search and discovered that other artists also call themselves Abstract Representationalists. Oh, well. So much for being original. But even if the term wasn’t entirely original with me, it definitely acknowledges a style into which much of my art falls. I like to think it lends my own work a vague cache. Heck, I could even belong to a “school!”
But the truth is, I just like to mess around with art materials, often just to see what happens. That doesn’t mean such pieces don’t have some measure of intent, it’s just that I never know how something is going to turn out in relation to how the materials are going to interact. Nor can I project success measured by adherence to the idea that sparked it. I suppose in general, I’ve been generally satisfied. but only rarely completely so. Not all attempts are successful, but at least I can relish the ones that are.
I also ought to mention the craquelure on the surface of many of my paintings and mixed media pieces. Much of it is a deliberate, integral element of the image, as with “Scripture,” “Uneasy Summer I,” and a number of other pieces. Sometimes it is an anticipated and accepted part of the aging process, as with “Object, Sign, Symbol.” It also can result from an experiment, and occasionally it is purely accidental and unwanted, as with “Face.”
Please note that many of the photos are inferior because I no longer have access to the pieces and had to scan old photo prints, some shot with a 35mm camera, others taken with simple consumer film cameras. And those who peruse the descriptions accompanying the photos will note the wildly variant dimensions of many of my pieces. The reason for this is simple. In the beginning, when I was trying to be a Surrealist and was painting with oils on canvas—like I thought artists ought to do—the dimensions of the pieces were limited to pre-stretched canvases and so were relatively standard. But those early years were not good to me financially, and I ended up making art on just about any available surface that was cost-free. I had access to a lot of heavy cardboard termed “chipboard,” which came in the packaging for the large film stock and printing plates used in my job at the printshop, hence the pieces whose dimensions are 20"x24" or 27"x30". The collages and paintings with less-regular dimensions were often done on scrap plywood and paneling that I scavenged from trash heaps and dumpsters. (All of the pieces labeled as being on “plywood” are either on regular plywood of varying thicknesses, paneling, or veneer.) Back then, I did not own power saws to even-up the edges or regularize the dimensions. I’m still guilty of odd dimensions, but at least I’ve learned to even up the edges. Usually. Too often, I just see surfaces that I want to cover, so that’s what I do without regard for any regularity.
And that phrase—“without regard for any regularity”—seems to be the general touchstone for my art. My collage work has remained relatively stable, though the media and techniques I have used for it have improved over time. But aside from that, I have dabbled in several styles and with a variety of media, very often mixing media. Nothing excites me more than finding new media and materials—materials that often are surplus or that I find discarded. By and large, I take junk, old magazines, discarded paint, and scrap plywood and try to make something out of them that resonates beyond the humble origins of the materials.
With that in mind, I hope that you, too, will find some resonance in these pages.