My art career started at an early age. In 6th grade in fact. It started with cartoons, to be specific Bugs Bunny and Mad Magazine. I developed my own style with my tiny cartoons. I dreamed of some day being a cartoonist for a local newspaper! My first art was from a neighbor of ours who knew I liked to draw. She had me design a Christmas card of a streetcar for her. I was paid 10 dollars. I continued cartooning all through junior high and high school.

How I got into art in college was rather unusual. I was standing in line with my parents for registration and my mother, who both liked my art and encouraged me in it, turned to me and said, “Why not art, Dick?”. That’s how I became an art major.
When I was at art college, I tried every genre I could find. I took painting, drawing, sculpture, etching, lithograph, serigraphy, and photography. I was very busy in college.

My college career I break into 2 sections. My first 2 years and my second 2 years. My first 2 years were still influenced by my high school cartooning. Some of it I call my weird period. My first two years were more fun than the second two. My brother said a similar thing about his college career. The one factor that influenced both my high school and college years was the Vietnam War. When I was a junior in high school, my brother spent 11 months in Vietnam. The protests, the riots, the violence, and the rebelliousness had a tremendous influence over those years. I did grow my hair long.

When I was a sophomore in college, I happened to date a very beautiful girl named Diane. I decided to dedicate a painting to her. It revolved a door in our first house. My mother told me it was a Dutch door- a split door with equal sections. The door meant something to me because it led to the porch where we kept our pet collie Lady, and when Lady wanted in, she would scratch the Dutch door. The image just stuck. I based my surreal painting of my girlfriend on it. I named the painting “The Girl with Invisible Hair.”

Another thing I did my second half of college was take 2 years of art history studying the Renaissance. My attraction to the Renaissance was that I liked to draw and there was a lot of drawing during that period. I tried my hand at copying some. I tried Rembrandt, Renoir, Brueghel, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Michelangelo.

To finish my college career the summer after my senior year, I spent 6 weeks in London. A friend of mine who was studying to be an architect and some of his friends, spent their senior year studying in Versailles. That summer they rented a flat in London and upon my mother’s suggestion, spent 6 weeks with my friend. I managed to make it to Paris for two nights. I had my portrait taken in front of the Eiffel Tower and went through the Louvre. I took self portraits of myself in London because of Rembrandt.

The second art period I went through was my Chicago period from 1974 when I graduated from Michigan State to 1994 when I moved to Los Angeles at age 40. I was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. One of the first things that happened when I got out of college was walking through the Art Institute and looked up and said, “That looks familiar.” My surrealistic portrait of my girlfriend came up as I saw for the first time Rembrandt’s “Women Behind a Half Door.” It was the exact same content. Some of my friends saw it too.

What I tried to do is keep some of my college genres going. I had no access to any printing equipment, but I continued to paint and draw. One thing I didn’t mention was a style of drawing I started in college, I was told that what I had gotten into was automatic drawing. I had come into this because of the pen I was using. A Rapido graph pen. Originally it was used as a drafting pen.

Some of the styles I kept doing were abstraction and surrealism. For a few years I gave up painting all together. I tried a new form of drawing: realistic drawing. I was told this and copying really isn’t art. I just wanted to try it. I also kept drawing old master’s drawings, and I kept taking photos.

My third art period was when I moved to Los Angeles in 1992. I’ve been here ever since. In Los Angeles, I continued to do what I basically did in Chicago with some differences. I kept both my realistic drawings and my Renaissance drawing going. I filled an entire sketch box with Renaissance drawings.

While in LA, I have taken two life drawing classes. One at UCLA extension, which I took for 6 years. It produced about 600 drawings. The other at the Brentwood Art Center which I took for 2 years. Also, I took 2 painting excursions to Europe. One to France, and one to Italy.

Another thing I tried for the first time was pop art. I painted a large cover of a comic strip. I also went out in the park in Santa Monica fairly often to draw.

Five years ago, I went to the local college, Santa Monica College, and took two photography classes. One, was to refamiliarize myself with black and white. The other was a digital single lens reflex class-something that was new to me. A friend of mine knew a photographer who helped me learn it. Over a two-year period, I took 5,000 pictures of Santa Monica village.

In the last 5 years since I went to Santa Monica College, I have taken on a painting project. Looking at a Picasso website and a book, I did my version of Picasso’s style. In 5 years, I did 50 paintings. Recently I have switched from Picasso to Van Gogh, and I am also copying birds from a nature magazine.

The final thing is the 8 books I made of my college art. It took 2 years to put them together. A friend of mine paid me $1,200 for a set.

I hope you like my art.