Beginnings

I began exhibiting my work in New York City in 1962 at the Rodale Theater on E. 4th Street in the East Village of Manhattan, when I was fifteen years old and a junior at Art & Design. I showed a selection of my abstract paintings in the basement gallery of the theater along with my friend and classmate Michael Steiner. I also painted half of a forty-foot backdrop in a manner similar to the style of Franz Kline, who was one of my favorite painters at that time, to accompany a student production at the Rodale Theater.  Many of my closest friends were art students and we’d take life-drawing classes at the Art Students League or the Village Art Center and visit the galleries and museums along 57th Street and Madison Avenue, or on Tenth Street in the East Village and we would paint together on weekends in Central Park and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. I met and befriended Jenny a student at Music & Art in the late summer of 1962.
 

I studied painting by visiting important museum and gallery exhibitions in New York City during the early 1960s and by taking painting and drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York with Stephen Greene and also in the summer of 1962 I studied painting with Arnold Blanch at the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York.  In Woodstock I joined my friend Michael Steiner who was also painting in the League studio; it was where I painted my first stain painting. That summer I met many interesting artists including Gahan Wilson, Herman Cherry, Ed Millman, Eric Kaz, Griselda Lobell, Allen Kaprow, Tom Doyle, Eva Hesse  (with whom I became friends) and several others. In the fall of 1962 I re-visited Woodstock with my friend and classmate Bob Lavaggi and Jenny came too. As a student at the High School of Art and Design on 57th Street in Manhattan I visited the galleries and museums almost on a daily basis. I studied composition, illustration and design at Art and Design. I graduated from the High School of Art and Design in June 1963 and was accepted to the Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Kansas City Art Institute where I was given a full scholarship.

I was a good student and I liked school especially the good friends and contacts I was making. I believed that to create consequential art an artist needed to have life experience and to make art, by practicing, and above all - by doing. I was accepted to The Cooper Union, Pratt Institute and I opted to go to the Kansas City Art Institute; where I was given a scholarship and I persuaded Andrew Morgan, the President of the school to give my friend Michael Steiner a scholarship too.  In late August 1963 we both attended the Kansas City Art Institute. In Kansas City I made dozens of large abstract expressionist paintings and assemblages on canvas, masonite and paper, using oil, and casein. I also made dozens of smaller watercolors, casein and oil paintings on paper, and many charcoal and cray-pas drawings.  I met and befriended many students there including my then girlfriend Margo Adams, and fellow artists Robert Barnes, Ross Coates, Wilbur Niewald, Dan Christensen, Larry Stafford, Carl Ponca, Dave Wagner, Gary Smith among many others and initially we all shared a studio. Larry Stafford, Dan Christensen and Michael and I would often talk about the art world; eventually I managed to find my own painting studio in the basement of a building on campus - that was a huge plus for me. Michael and I urged Dan to forget about figurative painting and think about abstraction. Michael Steiner quit and returned to NYC in October; I quit and returned to New York City in early November 1963, disenchanted with school and the midwest but determined to just paint. I remember saying to Dan and some of my other friends - see you in New York.

At sixteen I rented my first loft at 6 Bleecker Street near the Bowery (sublet from the figurative painter Leland Bell) and sharing it with Michael Steiner. My abstract expressionist oil paintings took on hard-edge's and large painterly shapes. I was determined to develop good work habits, discipline, and become a successful and serious artist. I showed my work to Stephen Greene who was my instructor at the Art Students League and who visited my studio downtown. Stephen Greene was harshly critical of my paintings – he said that I needed to find my own voice. I was determined to take his advice and do something new, and original in painting.

When I was a student at Art & Design on 57th street I visited the Green Gallery at 15 W. 57th Street several dozens of times. I remember Dick Bellamy showing me and my classmate Michael Steiner, Tom Wesselmann's paintings before and after Tom's show - Tom was teaching at Art & Design. I saw several exhibitions there including Donald Judd's first show in 1964 and in the fall of 1963 while I was briefly working for Art Cart, I picked up and helped to install Jim Rosenquists's second show at the Green Gallery that featured Jim's barbed wire sculpture ''Tumbleweed''.

During this period I worked part-time for Art-Cart a trucking firm that specialized in installing artist exhibitions in Manhattan’s leading art galleries. I particularly remember going to James Rosenquist’s studio, moving his work, and then installing  his one-person exhibition at the Green Gallery for gallerist Richard Bellamy in either December 1963 or January 1964 when I turned 17.

 In February 1964 I traveled to Los Angeles. In Los Angeles I lived with my aunt Sylvia and my cousin Robert Berke for a few weeks. Sylvia felt that I might be a bad influence on Robert because he was still in high school and he admired me and my sense of artistic freedom, but she wanted him to concentrate on his studies. I asked Sylvia to drive me to UCLA and from there I would be ok. Afterwhich I stayed with a friend from New York City, Gary Beckman; I found Gary by looking him up at UCLA. While I was trying to locate Gary (who I knew from Rubinsteins Hotel and who told me in 1961 that when he graduated from High School he wanted to go to UCLA and I believed him) I visited the art department. At the UCLA art department I befriended 3 girls; 2 of them invited me to stay with them until I found my friend Gary. I got into a fight with Billy Al Bengston there about which was better - New York art or LA art. A teacher broke us up and drove me around to the galleries so I could see what was going on. We went to the Dwan Gallery; and then to the Ferus Gallery where I saw a Roy Lichtenstein show of landscapes; at Dwan there was a gallery group show featuring Ken Price, Larry Bell and others. I stayed with the girls for two or three days until I located Gary who had left UCLA but was living in LA with his roommate and his girlfriend. After a week or so I hitchhiked to San Francisco where I visited with my cousin Arthur Faibisch. After visiting the San Francisco Art Institute one night I took the bus to Berkeley to find my cousin Phil Landfield who was a student at the university. I settled in Berkeley, California in March 1964, where I began painting Hard-edge abstractions primarily with acrylic paint. I lived at 2515 Dwight Way in Berkeley with my housemates Richard Bozulich and pianist Hiro Imamura; in my cousin Phil Landfield's place in the house. During the months that I was there I met and made friends with Peter Weinberg a poet; Frank Cook, a musician going to UCLA; Al Schwartz who ultimately became an attorney, Lenny Glazer a campus rabble rouser, Robert Bell a younfg artist/student at Berkeley and many others along Telegraph Avenue on the south side of campus. Lenny Santora from NYC arrived that summer along with my friends Michael Steiner and his girlfriend Griselda Lobell and who all three stayed with me in the house on Dwight Way. Lenny stayed for many months while Michael and Griselda returned to NYC after only about 2 or 3 months and then they got married.

I briefly returned to school that summer when I attended the University of California, Berkeley summer session and in September 1964 as a fulltime scholarship student at the San Francisco Art Institute. The first day at the art institute I befriended another new student Peter Reginato who I had met in Berkeley during the previous few months at the coffeehouse ''The Forum''; although neither of us had spoken to each other until that day. After a couple of months painting at the Art Institute Peter and I shared a studio on Telegraph Avenue in a vacant half of a Lucky Supermarket. A few months later I shared a loft in San Francisco with my classmate Peter Reginato and I painted dozens of large and small hard-edge acrylic paintings on canvas and paper. I met several young and beautiful ladies during those months in Berkeley; and in the fall of 1964 I moved in with my girlfriend Deana Pino into her apartment on Haste Street.   I permanently returned to New York City in July 1965 when I was eighteen years old.