statement

How Where and Why I Became an Artist

Once upon a time, long ago, sometime I guess when I was in my late teens or early twenties or something like that I was walking to a friend's house in Santa Monica and I found myself in the middle an enormous parking lot somewhere near the freeway.  I felt strangely that this experience of walking in the midst of this parking lot would never end.  I KNEW THAT IT WOULD NEVER END--somehow.

Time, so to speak, had stopped.  And here I was--in the middle of this huge ugly parking lot, for seemingly all of eternity, surrounded by a paranoid vision of Mercuries, Fords, Oldsmobiles, Chryslers, and Chevies, all gleaming in the California sunshine and smiling at me with the same sinister expression I'd seen on Kissinger's mug in the newspapers that morning.  I glanced at my watch--a weird hallucination appeared--oh my god!!!  Why did Time have to decide to stop forevermore just as I was walking in the midst of this horrendously tragic spectacle of modern life?!  Just as I was surrounded by these monotonous monstrous symbols of our death-machine culture?!

The sun beat down upon the scene and my poor head staggered beneath the weight of no-time.  Feeling dizzy, I swooned in a vertigo of swirling color and light. What remained of my conscious mind twisted into a sideways figure eight.  I vomited.  What would you have done?

Then, after a spell, as I was chilling out in the shadow of a VW van owned by a good Samaritan who had scooped me off of the pavement, I felt a little bit better and once again I looked upon my surroundings.  What was this?! To my amazement, where there had been death, horror, and paranoia--I now beheld an articulate flowing tableau.  Now I perceived structure and composition; harmony and balance; direction and coherence; variation and contrast; pattern and rhythm! . . . . . . and overlaying it all a beautiful melody of exquisite color-chord progressions. The cars as they came and went with their brake-lights and turn-signals blinking on and off became notes on a keyboard played by a masterful light musician.

I experienced a new mode of seeing, realized a new style of viewing, and unleashed a previously unbeknownst rapture of feeling.  I might have lingered there forever.  [And forever is in your mind]

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Later back at my room I turn on the TV news.  The talking-head is saying there was a three-car pileup on 101--four dead, five injured.  I turn it off and lie down...to dream, perchance to sleep...

And the very next day, now armed with my new philosophy of--'it all depends on how you look at things'--I decided to take up art.