About Me

I was born in New York and grew up on Long Island where I lived until I was thirteen years old.

The first influence on my work was my father. He went to Pratt Art School in Brooklyn, New York, to study painting and later became a creative director at a major ad agency in New York City. He would come home from work with drawing pads and markers for my older brother and me.

Besides being in nature, drawing was the only thing we spent time on as children. Over the years, competition grew between my brother and me at least it did for me being the younger brother. I constantly tried to draw as well as my brother, even though his skills were more advanced. Though we are Jewish, drawing the perfect, symmetrical Christmas tree became an obsession of ours. This drive to perfect an image and to compete with another artist is still very much alive in me today, for better and worse.

When I was slightly older, I became obsessed with drawing war pictures, just like all the boys my age. They were action-packed, violent and filled with blood and explosions. Sound effects were a must while drawing these images.

I started to sense around then that my drawings were slightly more controlled than those of my friends; I had the facility to better illustrate my thoughts. It is around this time that most people make up their mind to stop drawing all together or to continue. This was in the fourth grade. From that point forward, I took art in school and was considered one of the people who could draw. My notebooks were filled with drawings and only had a few notes.

When I was in eighth grade, I enrolled in the most incredible school that Long Island had to offer. It was and is still called the Huntington School of Fine Arts. I am pleased that the school continues to teach high-school students real art and preparing them for college. Since I was still too young, my brother, who was also enrolled in the school, would drive us there.

This is where I was introduced to fine art: I sculpted a head from a photograph of a man with a Panama hat and painted in oils a crumpled brown paper bag under a yellow light. The studios were on the harbor in the town. Huge windows looked out over the boats and the docks. Classical music filled the air. Creativity was everywhere.

Just before I entered high school on Long Island, my brother showed me the lyric book for Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It changed my life and in a single moment, it propelled me to write, especially poetry.

At the same time, a friend of a family told me about a progressive boarding school in Vermont. The environment there sounded creative, free and thoughtful. I asked my parents if I could leave home and attend the boarding school. But this was just when my brother was leaving for the Philadelphia College of the Arts to study painting and sculpture. My parents did not want to send off both my brother and me the same year. So instead, my parents elected to move to New York City with me and I ended up at a school called Walden, which was based on Henry David Thoreau’s book entitled Walden. It was a progressive school filled with hippies, poets and guys with guitar cases. It was also where I met my art teacher Steven Ettinger who looked like and acted like Picasso.

In ninth grade, I began drawing from live models at the National Academy of Art and Design on 89th street in Manhattan. I also studied the works of Cezanne and Van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bar none, the greatest influence on my work to this day comes from Cezanne’s canvasses at the Met. He laid it all out in his work and it was right there in front of me, allowing me to pick the fruit of his labors. He is still my favorite artist.

The other great influence on me around this time and eventually my work was a book on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo Buonarroti. This was right around when I became sexually interested in the world, and there it was, this book. His work was the most inspiring and exciting thing I had seen up until that point in my life. It still holds true to this day.

In eleventh grade, I started drawing at the Art Students League on 57th Street in New York City. After the school year was over, I went to a summer intensive course at Boston University, School of Visual Arts. The following year, I worked as an electrician at the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, New York, for two months. Theater had become a passion of mine for many years, having been trained in lighting design at Walden.

After high school, I attended Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester, New York, where I studied writing, painting, sculpting, drawing, philosophy and religion. I did not take an oil painting course until my senior year, but knew that that was what I had wanted to do with my life upon graduation. It was clear to me, though, that I would wait to start the practice of painting until after graduation.

I did not get along with my drawing teacher in college, but she really taught me how to draw. I absolutely did not get along with my oil painting teacher. After a big fight, I left the class as we both agreed that one semester was enough.

While in college, I answered an intern ad for an artist assistant in New York City. I ended up having the good fortune of working with an artist named Ora Lerman for several years and assisted her in a large Percent for Art project for a public school in New York City. She was a process-oriented artist: she had assistants make paint from scratch and tube it, stretch her canvasses, size them with glue and prime them with oil primer. We would transfer her drawings for her to the canvasses and did her under-painting for her. This is where I first learned the technical side of painting. She gave me a book of the Sistine Chapel ceiling for my college graduation. Her inscription read: “Look to the giants on your journey. Thank you to Ora, who passed away several years ago