In my own words…
In response to the dry exactitude of a typical resumé, I would like to add some “meat” to the bare skeleton of dates and events. My goal is to introduce some key moments in my career and highlight the ideas that drive my ambition as an artist.
My family was dedicated to health care – my father, a physician and surgeon, my mother, a retired nurse. We all assumed that I would follow in that profession, but covertly, I began drawing and painting in the basement. In the first year of Pre-Med, it became clear to me the basement was where I wanted to live. Finding the right place to study art proved to be extremely challenging, and after bouncing around several different schools, my father in frustration, said, “Here is the money I set aside for your education. Do with it what you want, but there will be no more.” I painted for a year, exploring the mythic and expressive shapes of letters, and at the end I won the First Prize and Special Jury Award at the Minneapolis Institute of Art Biennale in 1965. This gave me the confidence to move to New York and develop an artistic career.
Working as a studio assistant to George Sugarman proved to be my real education. Through George, I met many artists and joined in the fray of the Soho art world of the late 60s and early 70s. Testing my ideas and work against the prevailing winds of Minimalist and Conceptual Art of the time and the war in Viet Nam galvanized my work toward a deeply personal and philosophical direction that I have maintained to this day. I came to believe that my role as an artist was to reflect on the present moment, record my feelings, and find an artistic expression for this method. Highfalutin perhaps, certainly self-important, but deeply motivating.
The first recognition of this new approach and work was thanks to Marcia Tucker’s inclusion of a protest painting in the 1972 Whitney Annual, followed by a museum purchase. My first mature artwork came from a fascination with architectural ornamentation and the use of myth, natural imagery, and storytelling that embellished New York’s buildings. It excited me and showed me a way to expand a vocabulary beyond strict Modernism or Protest. I began improvising on botanic forms in a highly decorative style and searching farther afield for more
Inspiration. It was at this point that I was lucky enough to find representation with the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1974 and joined a group of artists under the banner of Pattern and Decoration that were on a similar search. We were a lively, slightly transgressive group, notably Bob Kushner, Kim MacConnel, Ned Smyth, Valerie Jaudon, and others, who shared an interest in non-Western cultures, decorative arts, and various spiritual practices. We all cast a wide net for inspiration. Mine fell on Persian and Indian miniature painting, Chinese pottery painting, and a variety of Pan-Asian decorative arts. Using animals, especially dogs, as my stand-in, I created tableaus satirizing human desires and foibles. These were augmented by elaborate borders of polyester double-knit fabric that harmonized with the strong colors and breezy brushwork of the pictures, giving them the feeling of children’s fables.
This was an exciting time in my career defined by dramatic artistic change, numerous exhibitions in New York, around the USA and Europe, along with significant critical assessment, commissions, and collaborations. “The Garden” collaboration with Ned Smyth in 1977 was a projection of decorative painting into a sculptural environment with a new emphasis on landscape. “Les Nouveaux Fauves” and “Dekor,” both in Germany in 1980, were important introductions to Pattern and Decoration in Europe. This phase of my career culminated in a purchase by the Museum of Modern Art in 1983 and a mid-career retrospective of these works in the “5 Painters in New York” at the Whitney Museum in 1984.
As the backgrounds of the paintings, rather than the narratives, became more interesting to me, my direction diverged toward landscape. With the idea of learning from an actual, compelling landscape, I moved to the Rocky Mountains near Aspen, Colorado. I created a large body of work based on many summers of hiking, drawing, and photographing the forms and energies of this powerful setting. The strategies of depicting the landscape in Chinese painting was also a constant source of inspiration. “The Mountain Retreat,” an exhibition I co-curated with Arnold Chang at the Aspen Art Museum in 1986 of Modern Chinese landscape painting, expressed this devotion, as well.
I came to experience the landscape as a repository of a wide range of human emotion and insight. The AIDS crisis inspired a series of landscapes of sadness and loss, the darkest of which was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1989.
After a brief return to New York and, shortly thereafter, a dramatic downturn in the art market, my family and I saw this as an opportunity for an adventure in China and, eventually, Hong Kong. Initially, we intended to make some traditional Chinese woodblock prints and travel the country. But a chance encounter with a retired manager of a handmade silk carpet factory and an idea to make a carpet for our loft in New York, set us on an even greater adventure which became Fort Street Studio. The spirit of collaboration always attracted me, so with the greatest collaborator of my life, my wife, artist, Janis Provisor, we set out to change the vocabulary of carpet design and solve the problem of turning a watercolor into a carpet. From 1994-2022 we built Fort Street Studio into an international brand of artistic, luxury, handmade carpets. This story can be traced on the website: fortstreetstudio.com or in the Rizzoli book, “A Tale of Warp and Weft.”
While juggling my responsibilities to the carpets, I continued to make art in a Hong Kong studio, summers in France and Italy in the 90s and 2000s, and eventually in Brooklyn. But I was compelled to limit my means to brush, ink and paper to simplify travel and to return to my most basic artistic impulse - drawing. A defining moment came while exploring the art in Paleolithic caves in Southern France, where a simple line drawing of a stag elk licking the face of a female elk showed me that artists 15,000 years ago were as adept as now, and making art was seemingly a basic human instinct.
Passing on the carpet project in 2022 to the next generation and moving to a country house and studio in Connecticut has allowed me to make art full-time. Still working with brush and ink and introducing color and collage, I have felt particularly free to explore old themes of decoration, landscape, as well as a new interest in the human figure, portraiture, and philosophical ideas.
Investigating concerns about the environment, social and political unrest, and our place in the swirl of current events drives my newest works forward. From the perspective of age, experience, travel, and relative tranquility, I am keen on parsing the visual potential of these issues, anticipating creating new visual equations, making new art, and confirming my notion of art as adult play. “And so it goes.”