I’ve been what you might call an Abstract Expressionist for about forty years. I’ve always felt that the language of Abstract Expressionism is a lot like jazz--open to infinite variety, extension, and refinement. It’s classic in that sense and will never go out of style. Like jazz, it requires dedication and mastery. It wasn’t until the 1980s that I felt I had really begun to achieve the kind of comfort and fluidity with the medium that allows me to improvise without self-consciousness. Over the years I have developed many techniques of my own devising, but they have become so integral to my process that I don’t have to think about them any more. I believe I am doing some of my best work now.
In many ways I am an underground dropout, have been called a “barbarian from the West” by Betty Parsons. New York is where I really went to school and found my identity. But I’m getting ahead of the story. My artistic history probably began between the ages eight and twelve. Born in Boston Museum. I attended Scholem Aleichern school and became fluent in Yiddish, could read and write it at one time. My aunt Anna painted and was the only intellectual in the family. It was she who said to me, “They killed so many of us, you should do something.”
When I was thirteen my father, an electritian, was transferred to Todd Shipyards in San Pedro, California. During my senior year of high school I met and hung around with song writers, dances, and early rock-and-roll and blues musicians. I met the songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who wrote some of Elvis Presley’s early hits (notably, “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog”). Music would continue to be an essential part of my life. In the early fifties, while living in San Francisco, I studied jazz drums with Herb Barman, drummer for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, I hung out at the Hungry Eye and the Purple Onion in North Beach. Then I took a job in Los Angeles at KFWB Radio as record librarian and met Jazz greats such as Shorty Rogers, Buddy Collette, Gerald Wiggins, and Max Roach.
It’s hard to explain exactly why I left what may have been a promising career in the music industry to become a painter. I came out of the Korean War knowing that it wasn’t going to be easy adjusting to postwar American society. Like a lot of vets, I felt restless and ill at ease. The San Francisco painter George Stillman described the feeling well when he said, “We had all been fed up with regimentation, with being put in a uniform and told what to do. We were looking for a way out of that discipline--a way to be individual. I went to Otis Art Institute. Going in a commercial direction was out of the question. Looking back I realize an important turning point was when Millard Sheets, the director of the school, called me into his office one afternoon. He praised my work but noted that I would need to take night classes in math and language to get my MFA. Gesturing toward his own airline poster hanging on the wall he said something about the contemporary artist’s responsibility to America. My angry response caused him to wheel back in his chair. I guess he thought I was going to punch him. “I just saw what your industrial complex did, dropping napalm on innocent civilians!” I told him, and walked out.
I left art school and moved to Venice Beach, where I became exposed to poetry, the muse, and anything goes. Venice was Los Angeles’ counterpart to the North Beach Beat scene in the mid-late 1950s.
This period of my life, while brief, was pivotal in developing what you might call my artistic conscience. The artists and poets I met in Venice were deeply engaged in a re-examination of consensus values of American society. We really weren’t “beat” at all because if there was any futility about the web of social lies around us our passion to create was regenerative. As Kenneth Rexroth said so well. “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense: the creative act.” In Venice I was reunited with Wallace Berman, an old friend from high school. I met Lawrence Lipton and became a regular at his Sunday evening “literary salons,” where poetry reading and wide-ranging discussions were attended by poets such as Stuart Perkoff, Bruce Boyd, Tony Schibella, and Charlie Foster (I was one of the figures on which he based his best-selling book, "The Holy Barbarians," which became something of a primer for aspiring Beatniks). I also met the Scottish by Olympic Press. My own Venice Beach storefront studio on Ocean Avenue became a hangout for Berman, Edward Kienholz, and John Altoon, and others. It was at this time that I begun writing my own poetry event at the Los Angeles Jazz Concert Hall (For more on my contribution to the art scene of Venice, see John Arthur Maynard, "Venice West: The Beat generation in Southern California," New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).
I narrowly escaped the reporters, television cameras, and gawkers that flooded into Venice after Lipton’s book on the Beats was published. I left for New York in June 1958, driving across the country to Brooklyn. At first I stayed in John Chamberlain's loft downtown on Frankfurt Street. In order to paint, I took any job, from moving furniture to floral design. I managed to rent my first studio in New York on 14th street. Altogether I spent five years in New York, my influences came not so much from specific artists as the energy in the air and the excitement that seemed to be part of the time. I met Franz Kline and he became a good friend. I worked with him in his studio and drank with him at the Cedar Bar, very rarely discussing art. I’m working on a painting right now called “Better They Don’t Understand,” which related to an incident with Franz. One evening at a party at his loft, my first wife said to him, “I love Franz, but I just don’t get it, I don’t understand what it is that you do.” Later that evening I apologized for Dorothy. Franz reached over and gave me a hug and said,” Better they don’t understand.” Meaning that explaining never really tells the story anyway. I’ve never forgotten that.
In the late fifties I caught the tail end of the Club and attended panels that included Ad Reinhardt, Herman Cherry, Larry Rivers, Milton Resnick, and Willem de Kooning. De Kooning was becoming famous and I was one of the few young artists he was willing to spend time with. He invited me to live and work at his East Hampton studio. If I ever had a mentor it was de Kooning. He taught me the importance of staying on the path. “You’ve got to outlive the bastards,” he told me. He impressed me with how long and hard he had worked without recognition or reward. De Kooning helped give me the strength to resist temptations that would have compromised my work. The biggest test was probably the time when Ivan Karo, Leo Castelli’s assistant, arranged for me to show Leo four or five paintings. I set them up in a semi-circle in the gallery’s foyer. Leo came down the stairs, looked attentively at all of them, whispered something to Ivan, and retreated up the stairs. Then Ivan pointed to one of the paintings and said, “Leo said if you can give him seventeen like this one, he’ll give you a show.” I responded, “ What do you think I am. A factory?” To copy myself would have meant creative death.
Despite my hot-headed obstinacy I did manage to have shows at the Angalesky Gallery and World House Gallery in New York, and in Washington, DC at the Henri Gallery. I also kept up contacts made earlier in Los Angeles with Walter Hopps (I showed at the Pasadena Art Museum) and with Joan Ankrum’s Gallery on La Cienega, where I exhibited intermittently for thirty years. In the early sixties, I worked for the Kennedy campaign. My painting “J.F.K.” received national acclaim and was written up in the Washington Post. In 1968, I bought a house in Woodstock, became somewhat involved in the counterculture there, met Peter Max and others, but my work did not “streamline.” Like so many other artists of that era. I never went in for Minimalism, although I did experiment with industrial materials, notably aluminum, which was a new material at the time. I also tried painting with Day-glo colors. I continued working (and have never stopped) in expressive abstraction. New York dealers in the sixties could not give this type of work away unless it was signed by Pollock, Kline, or de Kooning. To support my wife and two children, I learned to drive a fork lift, to mill beams, did general work in construction tearing down and building barns and homes--and kept on painting.
In 1977 or ’78, I returned to California and rented a storefront studio in San Pedro. I began repairing boats and jig fishing. For fifteen years I fished on small boats traveling up and down the coast of California. These experiences continue to have a profound impact on my work. Fishing allowed me to see exceptional shapes and colors, from large fish coming up from the depths, to the smog line during a Santa Anna wind. I’ve seen eighteen-foot swells, gray-green with caps, the water’s froths and streaks, and light reflecting off of and through the water both during the day and at night. I’ve seen rainbows in squalls. All of these things have found their way into my work, whether consciously or not. One of my acrylic collage-paintings called “ So You Want to Be a Fisherman” is dedicated to the California Maid, which sank 100 miles off the coast one night while I was fishing in 1985. This near-death experience has returned to my work many times in many guises, sometimes by warding off darkness with light and air. Some of my best “water-works” were done at a studio I had in 1989 at Angel’s Gate Cultural Center, which has a sweeping view of San Pedro Bay. I began making monotypes at this time using oil-based ink.
I was able to support my art by fishing and carpentry until 1995, when I fell off of a tall ladder, breaking several ribs and teeth. The fall has caused back pain that prevents me from heavy work. I am collecting social security and disability, which is not enough to pay for food, rent, and art materials. At this time I am staying with my son and using his garage in San Pedro as a studio. Occasionally a friend lets me use his etching press. Despite my accident I have been more productive this last year than during any single year of the previous decade. I have produced eighteen large acrylic paintings and about sixty monotypes. I participated in a group show of Beat art at the South of Market Cultural Center in San Francisco. I was also invited to do an on-site installation called “ The Seven Deadly Sins” for the San Francisco Center for the Book’s Beat show, which was favorably reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle. The Center then gave me a one-man show of paintings and monotypes. I also participated in a group show of California Abstract Expressionism at the Mendenhall Gallery in Pasadena. I was interviewed by Artweek and also by the Santa Barbara Review, which reproduced several of my paintings. And I have begun writing poetry again after a hiatus of thirty years. In the past year I have done several jazz-poetry performances, including one at the San Francisco Center for the Book (the other poet invited was Diane di Prima). The Center printed a limited edition of illustrated two videos of my performances for their permanent collection.
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