One thing about the faculty at that time, at Buff State, we socialized with the faculty,
whether it was in the state room having a cup of coffee during class or even after class.
Faculty would congregate and philosophize and we'd be around them and learning and asking
questions.
That became a learning situation, fulfilling, again, more mystery of the arts and the understanding
of the arts.
And this went on for the four years I was at Buff State.
It was a unique time because we were experiencing professional artists that applied themselves.
They weren't stagnant, they weren't just the classroom teacher.
They were teaching us life.
Years later, when I started teaching here in Buffalo at Bennett High School, as well
as City Honors, I developed a phrase that I use constantly with my students, that art
is life and life is art.
You know, it's funny being born in Brooklyn, New York, in Bed-Stuy and getting out as a
survivor, but before getting out, I had some wonderful experiences that are a basis to
what I'm doing now.
The watercolor class, where a teacher asked you to set up a grid and you worked with each
color and a color next to that color and so on and so forth.
Experiencing museums with paintings by Sir Rob Monnet and the dot patterns.
Having a photographic experience in high school, where the teacher introduced us to experimental
photography and that kind of experience just stayed with me hidden away until much later
in my college career.
It's funny how early educational experiences can change in life and make you look at things
differently, see things differently.
That whole photographic concept led to developing different approaches to making a photograph.
The collage slide that's handmade, Transparency, I gave it a name I called it Trans Graphics
years and years ago.
Basically I'm dealing with plastics, exploring plastics and exploring plastics through polarization
and in making slide and using polarizing material or polarizing filters and manipulating
the plastics, stretching the plastics, bending the plastics, cutting the plastics.
You get different color formations and textures that are seen as light as projected through
the slide, but it's not as simple as putting something together and sandwiching it and
closing it in a jibby mount slide mount.
I was using magnifying glasses, loopies, straight pins to move the plastics that I was manipulating
the color and then when I found a particular color pattern that I liked, I would close
the slide, quickly remove the needle and then everything was sealed in the slide itself.
And then I would take it to a studio and have them blown up and prints made.
Some other works that I've done are lifts and I've used those in making slide images
also.
You start with a magazine that is clay based.
You take a gummed piece of acetate, you rub it on the magazine or image that you want
to lift, you cut it out, throw it in hot water and the image separates from the paper itself
and you have the ink adhered to the plastic, the acetate, then you rub off the clay.
Now what I did with those images, I made larger images as large as the page would be and then
collage the images and then printed those.
So I had a black and white print.
Many of the images that I made in slide form I used in performance art in a group that
I was a member of called MAP, the Multi Art Performers.
Let's see if this works.
I've been working on a whole series of drawings that will become paintings because I'm exploring
the whole technique of color and color next to color and the application of color.
I'm thinking paint while I'm working with colored pencils.
Right now I'm dealing with pointillism.
I've always been fascinated by pointillism and it was because of an art experience I
had in high school, seeing Saraz, a graduate and it just blew my mind.
It sort of stayed with me but now it's coming back, it's coming out.
It's like having a baby and I'm approaching it in a very, very different way.
When I was 37 when he died, what would he be painting if he had stayed alive or been
alive for another 15, 20 years?
It's funny, people always have to find something realistic or something that they can relate
to in the reality sense.
There are many drawings that I've done over the last year that deal with Kazimir Malevich,
that deal with Mark Rothko, there's a whole series on Rothko and different approaches
that I'm taking, exploring Rothko and his sense of spirituality as well as Malevich
and his sense of spirituality.
I think you have to take those influences that are knocking on the door in your mind
and in your aesthetic heart and you have to open it and explore.
You notice there are different intensities of application of the colored pencil which
creates different sense of depth in the pieces.
Fine artists and teachers and art historians, curators in some cases, look at a work and
they say to themselves, this is a finished work by this artist.
I look at a work by an artist, it's not a finished work at all.
It's a transition.
It's a place where the artist stops and is analyzing what he has done and then takes
that and moves on from that point to a new transition, to a new experience, to a new
definition of work, where he's going, what he's doing.
