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| Art Destruction is an act of creation
In school my hand was intimidated by the pencil and the myterious task of recording what I saw. But I needed to draw. The result: a community of potato heads and doodled mutants that would have made Yves Tanguy feel at home in the margins of my homework. I had no formal art training. Few of my peers did. Art was not a serious subject in any of the public schools I attended until my senior year, when I had a cool teacher named Mr. Simes (sp). By then, it was late to teach me technique. But there was mischief in Mr. Simes' tired eyes to match his wooly moustache and subversive sense of fun, which doubtless prompted him to ask me to emcee a major school event. Needing to speak in a medium other than words, I discovered art by using scissors, not a brush. It is creation by destruction. From collage on paper, I experimented with other media, eventually refining a technique to affix gells and poymer resins to glass, a process I titled PLASTIGLAS. The fate of PLASTIGLAS in the art world was obscured by 3 factors: indifference, rejection, and equivocal acceptance that downshifted to rejection. First, I showed several pieces of PLASTIGLAS at a neighborhood alfresco art show in Fort Tryon Park and won first prize for originality, but never received a certificate or ribbon to certify the honor. Later, with slides in hand, I introduced PLASTIGLAS to major galleries. Ivan Karp of the OK Harris Gallery dismissed me for practical reasons: he could not insure glass. When I told Mary Boone, then of the Castelli Gallery, that windows need adornment more than walls, the woman who exhibited the doodles of Basquiat, disagreed. Colors, she said, are ruined by direct light. The Mussavi Gallery, whose motto was "Art is Oxygen" (they did not hand out oxygen tanks at their openings, but they should have), took one piece of PLASTIGLAS under consignment, but at the opening I looked for it everywhere, only to find it serving as a door-stop. Later, I rescued six-paned windows as they were replaced by ugly, cost-effective metal framed ones. I turned these mullioned frames into PLASTIGLAS sixtychs. They provide optimal privacy and beauty on the inside. When the interior is illuminated at night, these PLASTIGLAS windows provide iridescent light to night strollers gazing up at a starless sky.
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| Wife and Daughter, 1994 Woman on Hill, 1983 | | A Perfectly Oval Face, 1994 | |
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