The following paragraphs are tributes to influencial people in my life and art.

Stella Townley

Stella will always be my first true inspiration in life. She possessed so much of every great character. She always turned herself over to a higher power and worked toward the greater good. My mother was so brave and strong, the hardest worker, always learning more and growing.

Stella, like no other person I've ever known, enjoyed the simple sweetness of living, sipped it like a humming bird in the quietest hours of the morning. Hers was such a jewel of peace, just to be a watcher from a window of the life of a blue bird or the blowing trees and sway of grass. A quiet soul dedicated to sustenance of her family of five children, and her work as a nurse and care giver. I went with her a few times to the rehabilitation center in Dallas where she worked and watched her delicately remove pigskin covering a critical burn victim's wounds. As I watched what must have been such a painful procedure, this man turned to me and said, my mother was the gentlest nurse that had tended to his critical burns. I made rounds with her that day and realized just how level-headed and clear she was to give care to such severly wounded people. I'll never forget the one day Stella came home, and quietly cried because the life support had been removed from a boy that been in a coma for more that a year. She had prayed for this boy and given him care and washed his body all that time, to just let him go after such high hopes. Stella gave her strength every day; the people she cared for thought of her as the sweetest angel. This was so true. I will always be so lucky to have had such a strong, faithful and intelligent mother! Stella and I were absolute soul mates. We found so much harmony together. I thank God for her care and guidance; she protected and educated me and worked like a slave so I could experience freedom and become the person I wanted to be.

She taught me the finer aspects of oil painting, quite off the cuff - and woven into our daily lives, the love of art and music was always present for us. Stella taught me the laws of the golden mean, perfect perspective and proportion in drawing and painting. I can remember her hint that with such a great perfection of proportions in the creation of nature, that there was something wonderful and very god-like at work in our lives - the laws of art prove this. Nature is so blessed. A very quiet magic is always spinning its web. She was so dexterous, like many mothers in the world, knitting, crocheting, mending and sewing. She made so many of her own clothes and beautiful things for whereever we lived. A mastermind of measurements and numbers.

My mother Stella was victorous in life, everything she did came to such a great fruition. Everything about her had an air of perfection and balance. Being an air sign born in Libra, that came naturally with Stella. She had high expectations of herself and achieved every one of these through dedicated attention and work. She gave her all and in doing so found joy. After many years of difficult trials and raising five children, then ending up on her own took its toll on my mother but she hid it well. The awareness of life's reality, people's suffering and sickness, did materilize in her life, sadly sooner than later and did hit home. It is sad that the people that give the most in this world could very well end up sick just because of some environmental pollution, or worse yet, no outlet for pain stored deep inside over many years.

The human body is so sensitive to suffering, tension, strain and most of all the harsh chemical world we live in. My father Jean was a chemist and created products so new wonderful chemicals posing as "the next solution for life" were always around our house when I was young. In her last years, while she worked as a critical care-giver, Stella became sick and died of cancer. Stella went into surgery for the removal of a cyst in her breast and woke up to find she had undergone a radical mastectomy. We were all shocked.

She did heal up fom this surgery and her doctors started her on kimo-therapy because I guess they felt the cancer had spread already, possibly to her liver. The next year was some of the hardest times I can remember. The kimo treatments were so devastatingly strong and made her so sick. I used to wonder why if a person is diagnosed with a fatal type of cancer, what was the point continuing a treatment that was toxic and poisonous? Stella was so brave and tried to accept these facts while her children acted out all around her. It was a time of change and growing for all of us.

Her work colleagues, friends and children were always by her side, soaking every last minute of Stella's presence up. She was so sweet and was cherished by everyone that knew her. Stella was an absolute success in her life, and I know the beauty she contributed in life will keep alive and growing in this world through all the people she touched with her gentleness.

Mrs. McKnight and Walnut Hill Elementary School, Dallas, Texas

My years growing up had a few rough spots and some upheaval due to the changes my parents were going through.

A difficult point that mixed things up for me the most was when my mother Stella decided to move my sister and me with her to sunny Dallas, Texas, so she could live near her dear sister, My aunt Pat. We relocated to a very nice house in North Dallas, very close to my aunt's place, and life started out there, for a while, in a somewhat normal way.

Starting grade school was a wake up call for me because Texas was just a lot different than Long Island, New York where I was born. The difference started with school that fall. Through all the experiences I had in the next years, few were as important as the lessons in my music classes. Actually music class was where every day I was reconvinced of who I was and that music was my tool or process to become what I wanted to be in life.

Life translated to JOY in that class. It was our choice to be a part of that manifestation. Our leader was of most importantce of course! Where does this secret wisdom of the inner workings of life's song originate but with The Teacher, the shining example?! She was proof that homework works, and Mrs. McKnight worked so hard! She was one of the all time happiest people I've ever known. Every day, all day you could hear her slamming away at those piano keys, echoing down the halls and wild choruses of childeren excitedly chanting out the classroom favorites and show tunes of the day.

This woman was remarkable, amazing and so inspiring. Where she got all that energy I'll never know. Every day was refreshingly different with her.

Monday through Friday she wore new eye-popping outfits with swinging ethnic jewelry. You know, those crazy color prints on polyester from the 70s, and her hair was always a perfect swirly tall hair-do. Upon her oval face and strong nose was a serious-looking pair of reading glasses.

Mrs. McKnight was completely stimulating although when she was my teacher she had to be in her mid fifties or early sixties. She was an ace on the keys. She could make any old piano sound fierce.

She could play almost anything: jazz, rock, classical, ragtime, nursery rhyme... But she loved rhythm. On many days she would hand out boxes full of different indigenous instruments of so many kinds and lots of drums, that she had gathered from all over the world. Each row of children would be set off on their own rhytum and then she would combine all of us for a tremendous orchestra of world beats. Every day something like this to teach us music! She would dance and spring from row to row helping out the rhythmically impaired and coaching all the way. She showed us that anyone could understand music and to do so was to learn a new universal launguage that brings so much joy to everyone.

Every day we sang, sang, sang our guts out. I really think that helped me deal with my life. To open up and let it out, something everyone knows by heart, something wonderful! And every day in music class everything I was worrying about seemed a little less terrible. Thank you to all those who teach us music - thank you Mrs. McKnight! In 2000, when I was moving back to Dallas, I found that my old school Walnut Hill Elementary looked great - like new - and had received the honorary Blue Ribbon award for excellence. It was no wonder to me because of the quality of teaching I had experienced there too in the seventies!

Memories of the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan

I moved back to New York after a five year stay in Dallas to attend the High School of Art and Design when I was fourteen. Finally, I discovered many young people so much like me. It was a happy turning point in my life.

Getting to know each other over shared cigarettes and anything else that was passed around in our circles, it was easy to recognise that we really did share the creative mind of the time. Truly great kids partook in these circular gatherings on the terrace adjacent to the lunchroom of the High School of Art and Design building, then at 57th St. and 2nd Ave. Jean-Michel Basquiat was one among our circles of friends of young art intellectuals. He was of coarse always smoking and passing ganga, something that would always draw a group. Since the school was a "safe haven" for different gifted teenagers and free as a public school, there was an incredable cross-cultural assemblage of young talent. I think we were over-aware of the incongruities of today's world but idealistic that art could give us a reason to go on, to be optimistic, to believe in our talents. During our breaks on the terrace, out came all of the drawing pads and illustrated books. Everyone at this school was so talented and so unique, but the important thing was that it was a public school and we were all true street kids of the seventies. Art and Design was a public vocational school of the arts, the sister school to the "Fame"d Music and Arts School, both in Manhattan.

Poet Kenneth Patchen - The Old Wooden Desk

When I was a young lad, my mother, Stella had a strange old upright wooden desk that often softly called to me. Dark and shiny, like one of those old mail clerks' desks from a 1890s post office, for sorting small amounts of mail.... on the frontier. It had so many little drawers and shelves in it with white knob-handles, that seemed to always say "open me."
This desk was so fascinating to me because it held in it so many interesting things.
To a young boy, a fantastic little clock, magnifying glass, little crystal ink wells, and so many other foreign objects needed to be looked at, examined.
On both sides of this desk were bookshelves with many small hand-bound books that were not quite like any books I had ever seen yet, except on these shelves. Well I was only around the age of six or seven when I really started to be drawn to all that this desk had in it.
These little books were all Poetry books. They were what was really speaking to me.
What I guess was captivating was that they were so much like my fairy tale story books and fables and yet they were for grown ups - and no one ever looked at them - but me, as far as I know.
Little beautiful simple books with stylized elegant covers, but inside just words, so clearly and neatly spaced out on the page - like they were really special. As I grew a little older I realized just how special they were.
What I remember was important also - not too many words, like the gigantic volumes my brothers and sisters had to read for school.
My mother Stella, bless her deep soul, loved Poetry! She kept these collected books safe and secret, in the shelves of the dark desk, because so many feelings had been stored and locked away forever in my family, and Poetry books are for those that want to feel things in life deeply, freely and out in the open.
Some of the authors were Edna St. Vincent Millay, Steven Spender, Mildred Hayward, and Kenneth Patchen among many others. In Patchen's poems, he seemed to be speaking to children half way, and then there were many things in his poems that I could not understand yet.
Strange words put together in ways that made me want to understand them. Maybe I could read some of them in the beginning and each year as I got older I would eventually skim back through these books and gradually the real pictures started to take form.
The two books by Kenneth Patchen I remember first were "In The Dark Kingdom" and "Red Wine and Yellow Hair." I read the poems in these books over and over as a child. I had no way of knowing that Kenneth was part of a "Beat Generation" of writers, and his writings were quite obscure at the time of the late sixties.
One poem in these I will always remember is "The New Being." What can one add or say to the truth in this poem?
Kenneth Patchen, what a dear soul, so like my mother, to feel things on a level so few can go on a daily level. So honest and beautifully cruel. So like all this world. Few adults are brave enough to say what a child will say. When an Artist can break through the suffering their life may show, and report back to the purest spirit, poems written in small words, with a bleeding heart, and then resolve like a child at their parents' knee.
To give a true account by the center instrument, heart-mind-thought-feeling-judgment and resolution. This is an achievement, to feel and process so much darkness, but choose to reflect light, and to find your own light, that is what I would come to learn about Kenneth Patchen's poetry. The strength of clarity in his images, and fearlessness to say it how it is, gave my mind a backbone as I grew up.

Remembering Salvador Dali

Out running around again with a humorous high school friend, probably cutting class. Skipping through Central Park in Manhattan that sunny afternoon, coming up to the end of the park green. Soon we came walking up to Tiffany's right across the street. Great gasp!... much to our suprise was a little bent-over man with a black cape and a cane, twisted mustash and a perfect page-boy haircut, which gave this man away as none other than Salvador Dali himself! I was struck with shock. We must have stood there on the street corner for five minutes gawking with eyes popping out at him, whispering to each other about what to do about this great moment as two teenage artists. I was just about to lunge across the street to fall at this aged great artist's walking cane when my friend reminded me of his feebleness and age; he suggested that we should leave him alone and have some respect towards his weakened condition. I agreed, not knowing the right thing to say anyway. I've thought about that instance in time often since, and of course wondered why I didn't go on over to him anyway. He was watching us and I knew he felt our great admiration.

This wonderful, eccentric artist was my first modern art hero. The absolute grace, the Golden Mean of style, precision and technique has thrilled contemporary generations and defining surrealism. Salvador Dali took oil painting into a fine visual science blended with metaphysics and great romantic fantasy, very much real to him and all who can see vicariously through the eyes of the late, great Salvador Dali.

English Painter Francis Bacon, Abstract Persona

On March 19th, 1975, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened an all-encompassing retrospective exhibition of Francis Bacon's paintings. I was thirteen at the time, when my sister brought me to see this collection. I had never yet seen a large exhibition of abstract art like this. It was a spell-binding point in my artistic life. It was like walking into the intimacy of some incredible persona from another planet. I can remember how much I turned around, cracked open, identifying with images brought out of an unusual life, a place I had little footing in. So waltzing from picture to picture with my dear sister helped me to pull my youthful curtains away from my mind. Francis Bacon challenged my honesty. He used hidden schizophrenia as a vehicle for abstract art, shifting reality until it shows the spirit in all its turmoil and opposing inertia. But the futurism in Francis' paintings is what intrigued me most. I realized that I too could use art to expel and work out all the strangeness that was inside of me.

To remove emotional form from a traditional context, to explode the shock of visceral existence. His paintings most very large, some small, dramatically simple yet with complex places of movement. They are graphically three dimensional in the empty setting of one's inner world. Stark, simple, illuminating lightbulb in a wooden floored room. Surface cold of moving skin covering over the colors of nakedness and warmth within. Black of a window or doorway. The tongue of a man. Writhing bodies, seen distorted in a silver mirror, dripping shaving cream, spit, blood - his body stretched, twisted by lust, splashed with color smeared by a lover. This is what is on his canvas. In the show were also portraits. Each one seemed to be showing some secret-dream side of the person he painted. A personal insight presented by the artist using a kind of out-of-body vision. This show was a real initiation for me into the world of abstract painting. Francis Bacon's work has influenced my ways of thinking about art like no other artist. It was so liberating to experience this artwork at an early age.

Louise Nevelson's Atmospheres and Environments

My first introduction to Louise Nevelson's Atmospheres and Environments at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980 was a rich experience. Again my thanks go out to my dear artist frends of the time who led and introduced me to so many great artists and musicians. This journey to see Louise Nevelson's Environments retrospective would be one of taking in art to my heart forever.

The show was to commemorate and celebrate her 80th birthday along with the Whitney's 50th anniversary. I was in the process of moving to Philadelphia and each time back in NYC was a melencholy thrill for me, knowing my days in New York would be inevitably less and less. But each trip back seemed to hold more and more significent experiences for me. Going to see this art show was one of those great important times. Musical yet so silent, it seemed to transform one entire floor of the Whitney into an elegant sophisticated temple of geometry and sacred curves made by a being from a civilization that we on earth know little about. Luckily we were able to attend the opening night and I had a chance to personally greet the artist and be graced by her poise and beauty. I mentioned that I was a sculptor too and the experience was extremely inspiring for me. It showed me that with dedication and clarity of sight, one could manifest their deepest dreams and visions in this very world. Art, like faith, can take someone joyously through life to the culmination of a divine vision.

Yves Tanguy, Surrealist Painter

In my teens as I discovered more history and art of the surrealist and abstract movement occuring in the early to mid 20th century, I found Yves Tanguys' history and artwork woven in with the more known artists of the time. I found it very interesting that he was mostly self taught and that he worked not liking to plan his paintings much. It seems that his imagery just grew and took form as if he were summining up visions intuitively, so familiar but so based in abstraction. His work reminds me of grafitti artists from the streets of New York and how so much perfection comes about naturally with the excitement of creating. His images squiggle up from sandy landscapes much like Salvador Dali's oil scapes, but break up into micro-elements and move away from the surreal into a landscape of more pure abstraction. His work is definately from a place that many artists tap root into, I myself being one who also dreams about the soft cosmic forms that lay just beneth the glaze of our so well-defined world. Yves Tanguy's wife, acomplished painter Kay Sage, is not to be overlooked when examining this time period's intriguing art. Her paintings are slightly more refined and focused, a more surreal continuation of this mystical and intuitive art mind-set.