As a university student in 1968, I attended a campus screening of a short film on Jasper Johns produced two years earlier for National Educational Television. Everything about Johns was unlike anyone I knew or had known. He seemed to inhabit a space that was at once ordinary and extraordinary, and whose atmosphere was both rarefied and obvious. I was impressed by his acceptance of the brute facticity of the objects he produced and his professed neutrality toward them. This had a profound effect on my attitude then and persists even now. 

Shortly after that experience, I gave into a compulsion to stretch several large canvases and began three series of paintings: 1) blended horizontal bands of color, 2) abstract impasto gestures inspired by the toss of Iching coins, and 3) encaustic eye charts (from images burned into my brain by therapy following eye surgery during early childhood to correct a condition that predisposed me toward a double vision of things). It became immediately apparent that a successful studio practice would require three things:  time (to work), space (to work), and money (to be able to work). I could usually fulfill two of these conditions, but rarely all three.  

During the first years of the 1970’s, I worked in art departments in theater and film doing set construction, painting, lighting, prop procurement and design, and stage management. In 1975-76 I designed theatrically themed interiors for a bicentennial installation, a nightclub, and a record store. I also went back into the studio and began a series of paintings that opened the Lowe Gallery in Atlanta in 1989 before turning my attention to computers and video; around the same time, I began directing the nonprofit organization, Public Domain, Inc., in what has proven to be a failed attempt to create an organization as art — an effort which continues to provide opportunities to indulge my ambivalence toward all things involving aesthetic considerations. 

Never shy about embracing a simultaneous desire to say or do opposite or conflicting things, I am currently working on a new series of paintings and prints and reviving an interest in black and white photography while maintaining a lifelong mental movement toward gray.