Among the reasons to make art is a judgment that the details of a life are not always of overwhelming interest even to the person living it. The movie “Crumb”, by Terry Zwigoff, offers an excellent description of why a person might choose to become an artist. The movie “La Belle Noiseuse”, by Michel Piccoli, is a fine analysis of the creative process. The book “Jean Christophe”, by Romain Rolland, is a wonderful description of an artist’s life. I was born in Las Vegas in 1954. I was very young when I began making art. My parents were creative people who gave me lots of encouragement to pursue this interest. I read and studied and drew pictures pretty much all the time from early grade school through the end of high school. Here is a snapshot: Listening to my father rant about what a jerk Walt Disney was for turning the wonderful, dark book, “Pinochio” into a stupid, cute movie. After high school, I spent a decade in LA and then returned to Vegas, where I live now. I had no sense during my years in LA that I had left Las Vegas. Living in LA was for me a way to learn more about Las Vegas. I went to UCLA as an art major for a year, during the period when conceptual art was in favor. A bright Art 101 professor told stories about partying with his artist friends in Paris in the Twenties. It seemed like everyone in class was taking notes about these stories. I didn’t see the point of taking notes about such stories. I wondered how I would study for the final exam. Come final exam day, what the professor said before dismissing us was something to the effect of, “How could you students have taken notes about what I’ve been talking about? There will be no final exam in this class. You all get an A. Go home.” This was the sum of my formal education in art and the end of my formal college career. I spent most of the next ten years in the UCLA undergraduate library, which would get crowded every once in awhile when students would study for exams. I sat in on UCLA classes with the filmmaker Fritz Lang, and with the founder of computer-generated animated art, John Whitney. I hiked in the hills of Malibu and saw many films during the heyday of the LA movie revival houses. I was a regular attendee at the Theater Vanguard’s underground film series. During the Eighties, I made a little money and took two six-week Euro-tours. I would stand in train stations and look at the list of twenty cities a couple hours’ ride away, and recall my study of the history of all of them, which had begun in childhood. I visited and revisited Chartres cathedral. I liked jobs that allowed me to work short hours, thirty-hour weeks, so I could have lots of free time. I have been employed as a movie theater door stop, lemon picker, office gopher, Kinko’s printer, liquor clerk, delivery driver, Keno writer, restaurant waiter, janitor, internet stock investor, and slumlord. The last two jobs took a lot of time. My primary occupations from the late-Eighties forward are pretty well documented on this site.
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