THROUGH MY OWN DEVICES
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Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1951, I grew up in a neighborhood of Italian and German immigrants mixed in with West Virginia and Kentucky transplants. That neighborhood was called "The Bottoms." It was an area of Columbus that few with more than one choice would permanently choose to call home. From an article in The Atlantic in 2014, John Tierney had the following to say about The Bottoms: ... tagged with the derogatory nickname “The Bottoms,” because it is below river level and because it long has been home to those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
Most men who lived in the bottoms were laborers; some worked hard, started their own small business, and kept out of trouble. That was my father, a barber who eventually owned his own shop. He rarely drank, never took a day off and often moonlighted with his contractor brother or made pizzas at Josie's. Others found a "good job", stuck with it and moved up to "The Hilltop". Yet, it seemed most stayed in a perpetual cycle of drinking, low skill labor, unemployment, and welfare, got into trouble and were in and out of the workhouse or prison. Despite it all, The Bottoms remained our home. It was where our family immigrated so there we stayed.
It was a tough and dangerous neighborhood. As a boy roaming the alleys and railroad tracks with my friends, we often found it difficult to stay out of trouble. There were many, many fights and with us, the only downside to stealing was getting caught. Don't get me wrong, I was not a tough kid nor was I a particularly good fighter. I just lived in the neighborhood and that's how it was.
Education held little value in my neighborhood or for that matter, with my family. It was expected that we would do as well as we could, squeak through and if we were lucky, get a factory job at Westinghouse or General Motors. I didn't do well in school. I was curious enough to be smart but too feral to be trained. Still, I liked to read, write, and draw, but mostly I drew. Drawing became my intellectual focus There is an advantage that comes with being disadvantaged. If you're curious, honest with yourself, alert, and not lazy, you figure things out on your own through a self-made system and through your own devices. You see through the accepted bullshit, past the surface of things to what is actually there. You don’t fall for the things that proper people fall for. When you come to a conclusion, it’s through your own observations and thinking rather than from the dictates of others. You own your conclusions. You learn to trust yourself and to keep an arm's length from popular opinion.
Public school was out of the question. We were Italian Catholics so... Catholic school was where I spent twelve years. Sophomore year of high school, with the suggestion and help of a very caring nun (despite the cliché, most nuns were caring and loving, strict but caring) I began taking Saturday morning art classes at The Columbus College of Art and Design. Senior year, again with her help, I got a small college scholarship to the same school. That next September, in 1969, I started college and left The Bottoms. From 1969 to 1974 I attended The Columbus College of Art and Design.
I did well in art school and began to find my own voice. However, I got into minor bits of trouble, spent a night or two in jail here and there and continued to get into fights. I left before receiving a degree. Although I left The Bottoms, The Bottoms never left me. After college, I continued to paint and draw obsessively and exhibited locally, all the while bouncing from one low skill, low paying job to another and always ducking the landlord.
I got married. At a point, both my wife and I decided that we needed to leave Ohio. Late in 1979, we moved to New York City, shortly after my wife became pregnant and our son was born. Our first apartment was a railroad flat at 126 Guernsey in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. After a year, we moved to 217 Bowery and stayed there for ten years. I worked as a laborer for several moving companies, drove a cab and did a lot of painting and drawing. I started to be included in group shows in Brooklyn and eventually in New York City at The Palladium, The Knitting Factory, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Bess Cutler Gallery and The Phyllis Kind Gallery. My first New York solo show was at Avenue B Gallery in 1984. It sold out! I subsequently had half a dozen additional, successful solo shows in both NYC and LA during that time. I was being included in group shows throughout United States, Europe, and Japan with such art world luminaries as: Sol Lewitt, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Gladys Nilsson, Karel Appel, Sandro Chia and Kenny Scharf, to name only a few. I was doing what I was meant to do in a place where I was meant to be!
Suddenly, it all came to a halt in the last days of the 1980s. Fulfilling a promise to my wife not to raise our son on The Bowery, we left New York and moved back to Ohio. As if it had never existed, the last ten plus years vanished. I was turning forty, back in Ohio, working for minimum wage, roofing, painting, and framing houses. Still, I painted and drew without pause.
Gambling on the future, about a year into it, I went back to CCAD and took the one class needed to graduate. I applied to and was accepted to grad school at The Ohio State University with a full scholarship, a small stipend, and a teaching assistantship. It’s there I learned to think more critically about my work and at the same time realized that I enjoyed teaching very much. But then, in 1993, that too came to an end, and I was back again roofing, painting, and framing houses.
After a while, with the help of a friend, I got a job at Don-Rey Outdoor Advertising painting fifty feet, photorealistic billboards for ten hours a day, six days a week. That job tested my chops as a painter and has had a profound and lasting effect on my practice as a painter. Three nights a week I taught –as an adjunct- a beginning Two-D or Drawing class at OSU. After nearly four years of working fifty eight hours a week at Don-Rey and another ten at OSU, it was beginning to rattle me.
I was offered a tenure line position at OSU, Lima, heading a one-person department and teaching foundation courses. I was forty-five. Suddenly my life was given a shot of adrenalin. Within the three tiers of my job description, one was research or in my case, creative endeavors. In other words, I had to, I was required to paint and exhibit. I navigated my way through the tenure process, initially doing a few university shows and occasionally publishing an article. Eventually showing in NYC, LA, and Europe again. Now, in my mid seventies, I'm still painting.
All this, more than anything else is simply a long-winded way to explain or clarify an attitude, my attitude, an attitude that started in The Bottoms.