This watercolor and ink drawing was made after I moved to New York from Detroit with my mom after the death of my dad. At the art school I attended in Detroit, Cass tech, we had a notorious art teacher, a certain Mrs. Greene, who was a stickler for discipline and technique. One of her assignments was to go outside and draw the scene across the street in as much detail as we could observe. This was a great excercise on looking and the scrutiny of form, texture and movement, particularly if it was a busy avenue. I recall that when I moved to NYC one of my first subjects, while still in high school, was to walk around the city and draw different streets. I particularly loved the Village and Riverside Drive, but this relatively quick sketch was done somewhere on 57 Street around Carnegie Hall, not too distant from the Art Students League where I was later to study with Reginald Marsh, who, incidentally, also assigned his students to march down to the Bowery and draw the homeless and downtrodden sleeping on the subway stops and in back alleys.

As I recall, this is one of the many small sketches I did along Riverside Drive when I lived on the West Side of Manhattan along with a friend named Marvin Waller, both of us in our teens. We loved to go places and draw together, often back to back so we wouldn’t be tempted to see each other’s work in progress. And we went everywhere.. walking all over - up and down the island for miles on end, sometimes making drawings of innocuous subjects, which we described as future details for paintings we planned some day. The Hudson River was a favorite place to draw after school let out, as people were walking dogs, lovers rolled on the grass and boats blew their whistles and honked their foghorns on gray days. Manhattan was relatively safe in those days. Sometimes strangers would come up to ask us to draw them or to criticize what we were painting. It was all part of art as a life source of give and take, of seeing and drawing, of accepting and learning self-criticism, and above all, of pure enjoyment.

Sometime in the mid ‘fifties I went to Italy with my first wife, Gladys, a professional violinist. Ostensibly, she wanted to study in Florence with a certain Maestro Maglione, and I wanted another opportunity to study the works of Botticelli, Giotto and Leonardo. I had been to Italy on the GI Bill in 1949, spendng time as a student in Rome and Florence to study the Italian language as well as the Florentine renaissance. I had some American artist friends in Florence at the time, one of whom, Joan Hogg, was a secretary to the great American art connoisseur from Harvard, Bernard Berenson. Joan and her husband, Jim, helped us find a large pleasant apartment in the Bobili Gardens where we ran into an artist named Archie Bressler, who had a scholarship from the Art Students League of New York to paint an :”Italian” show. The three of us became close friends and traveled around Tuscany, seeking out lesser known churches and other architechtural marvels.All this in addition to basking in the glory of Firenze – language, food, music and art. One day, Gladys and I went to Borgo San Frediano where an Italian artist friend, Rudolfo Marghieri, told us about an excavation in a small church where a well known, but hitherto lost mural was about to be uncovered and the overlaying gesso chipped away. We jumped on our Vespa and drove there to see with our own eyes this marvelous happening… the revealing of a masterpiece of Piero della Francesco. Fantastic! On the road, perhaps for lunch, we stopped at Prato and Arezzo where I painted this City Hall scene spontaneously, with enthusiasm, and, I must say, somewhat under the influence of one of my favorite French artists, Georges Rouault. Looking back at this image touches and jogs my memory to the tasteful spirit of Italian art and architecture. It is not quite what a madelaine was to Marcel Proust, but still quite impressive to me even to this day.

I have always been attracted to places wherever the sun was strong and hot. Part of the mystique must come from my early days in the South of France where the Provencal sun is an integral part of the lore and understanding of the relationship between everyday life and nature. My creative juices seem to flow dramatically whether in Hawaii, Southern Italy or California. The sun, combining the female symbols of nurturing, warmth and strength, is my friend. While living and painting in a primitive cabin in Mallorca in the Balearic islands of Spain in 1956, I observed and understood for the first time how the ancient plowed and patterned fields of Banelbufar, the brilliant green hills of Deya, and the thousand year old olive groves outside of Palma, came to be integral to the landscape. The power of the sun is what consolidated everything and formed the culture of the people and the land. In this cryptic drawing/watercolor, I synthesized my personal moment of truth with the sun, the land and the sea by reducing it to a short-hand of elemental graphic touches or gestural calligraphic lines and colors. The environment, made up of cactus, gnarled olive trees, the centuries old stone walls, and the Mediterranean under the sun, became a cauldron in which to pour the rich sensual stimulus I felt.

This happy day was symbolic to me of my newborn son, David Abraham Secunda, born at UCLA hospital on May 27,1963. I painted what seemed to me to be an open window, making the viewer (in this case, me) the person looking out onto a new day of freshness, sunshine and infinity. David’s mother, Gladys, was brave, being left alone in the delivery room without the father to be able to be a part of the miracle of birth. In those days, even in the enlightened campus hospital of the University of California, the consensus was that men were too sheepish to participate in the actual delivery. Thank Goodness I was there, under other circumstances, for the marvel of my second son’s arrival, Alexandre, born in Paris on November 27, 1991, 28 years later in the City of Light. Good Morning hints at blurred horizons, perhaps promising an unknown future. The upward curvature and subtle change of color in the foreground is supposed to represent the bottom of the viewer’s eyeball as well as a subliminal smile of contentment. The broad palette-knife stroke of pale lemon yellow across the sky characterizes the courage to stand tall and take a deep breath. I realize these are personal and subjective characterizations but to me they are real.

Sweden is a peculiar country. For me it is a puzzling yet attractive enigma. It is cutting edge modern yet compulsively respectful of the past. The people are often happy, brooding, sullen and ecstatic at once. They are considerate caregivers while embracing stoic loneliness. When I was first invited to exhibit in Uppsala in 1965, I was awed by their knowledge of everything American and their intellectual intimacy with international hip culture generally. I enjoyed the winter, so different from sunny California where I came from, but found working there uninspiring because of the uniformity of life I encountered. Though the actual standard of living surpassed many places in the U.S. then, there was a sameness I came to see was their understanding of what democracy meant. Therefore, many of my Swedish creations and subjects have an ambivalent bent. The artists I met were most generous, sharing their knowledge, ideas and studios with me unstintingly. The simplest tasks are complex in a culture where you don’t speak the language and are trying to buy raw umber paint or find out where to get a pair of gloves. In particular, I recall two artists, Jan Thunholm and Nils G. Stenquist, both of whom I am indebted to for warm friendship and help in a hundred ways too complicated to ever explain. In 1965 the Cathedral of Uppsala was the focal point of the town - the old University, commerce, marketing and transportation. So on a cold November night I took a photograph of the spire from my hotel room window. It was no surprise to later discover that it was out of focus and blurry. In an odd way, this deformation appealed to me. I went to nearby town (Gavle) where a silkscreen printer I knew, Jonas Engquist, offered to work with me on a small edition. I enlarged the photo, backed by a thickly woven benday screen, and together we printed this strange looking snow-covered melting town or dreamy village scene in a warm sepia tone.

During the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles I did an instant flashback of frustrated fear and instinctive catastrophic revulsion dating back to the 1943 race riots of Detroit, where, as a youthful boy of 15, I witnessed cars overturned, bombs shot off of rooftops, and bloody confrontations on Woodward Boulevard, where street cars were stopped and brutally emptied of blacks, and the Cass corridor where I was going to high school. It seemed as if in 22 years I had changed but race relations were still dicey, crazy and scarey. The night we heard about the beginning of the violence was a pleasant balmy August California evening. My wife, Gladys, had prepared a small dinner get-together for sculptor Mel Edwards and his wife, Karen, who, it turned out was unable to find a baby-sitter, so stayed at home. We were living on Easterly Terrace near Silverlake, in a quiet middleclass 3 story house designed by a student of Richard Neutra. As was customary among artists of that period, I used the large garage as a studio. My 3 year old son David was put to bed and we sat around talking about jazz music when Karen called and said there was smoke and fire around their Watts loft and she was frightened. Mel, who is black, rushed out to his car in our driveway, where we started hearing the distant sounds of fire sirens and police cars. I asked Mel to phone me as soon as he got to Karen to let us know if she and the kids were ok. To our consternation, Mel never called that night, but the next day he said things were getting pretty bleak. I created Negative Landscape by tearing up newspaper photos and making a montage from the following day’s horrible news. I intentionally used an offset lithographic printing technique to emulate a newspaper look, rather than a refined glossy or etching feel of original art. The immediacy had to be conveyed by the title, the technique and the subject matter. The handcuffed man in the photograph I used as a sun symbol in the sky overlooking the rubble and state guards, was actually shot and killed shortly after this photograph was taken. I attempted to express this story by using a mirror image of his otherness in darkness across the page as a negative self.

Moon Mountain combines many of the elements in art that I love. For example, there is the moon, the mountain, the starkness of graphic black ink as a tool and a motif, the rich textures afforded by working on an aluminum lithographic plate, and finally, the found objects inserted into the moon image by spraying around such mundane bits and pieces of discarded matter as bottle tops, beads, toys, screw washers and fragments of a necklace. I was pleased with the spontaneous results of Moon Mountain, initially done while on a grant to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1969. Prior to being invited to create art in the workshop directed by June Wayne, I was employed as a part time writer by the studio, to explain and promote the works of artists such as Josef Albers, Richard Diebenkorn and Rico Lebrun, among others, by demystifying the lithographic process to the press and explaining how these artists worked. This was an invaluable experience to me, firstly through conversations and observations with artists I admired and respected, and secondly, by teaching me the ability to write briefly yet clearly to communicate a complicated subject in a popular understandable way. Finally, this is one of the first of a long series of graphic works in which I learned to collaborate with professionally trained master-printers, who taught me about give and take in the art of true creative collaboration. This is not a simple task, neither for the artist or the printer. Temperaments fly, reasonable disagreements concerning process abound, and goals are technically and esthetically disputed. In the end, however, to arrive at a successful result, mutual respect and a shared sense of experimentation toward the common goal usually proved satisfying. Few words need to be exchanged when the aura of fulfillment is achieved, and often a smile or a quiet thank you after days of effort, says it all.

By all measures this is an odd composition. Cut in half midway in the center at the horizon and divided crudely between a splatter of paint in the foreground and a carefully collaged set of diverse trees directly above, backed by a cubist mosaic sky broken up with angular shapes, and to top it off, a diamond formed confrontational sun peeking out from behind two delicately silhouetted fir trees. And yet, this mixed media print seems to project the landscape I had wished, the amalgam of four seasons: hot and cold, wild and manicured, and happy yet mysterious. To combine these elements without a mishmash of sugary clichés was my problem. My solution was to montage a potpourri of techniques in a harmonic arrangement of color and shape. If this were a musical oeuvre it would be closer to the cacophony of Stravinsky than to the harmonies of Franz Schubert. The original collage from which this image was derived, was actually less dynamic than the final print itself, as the graphic medium of pochoir has a way of uniting the various colors and textures in the way the watercolor paint is applied in this 19th century French medium developed by Toulouse Lautrec for use in his posters, later adapted by the more contemporary artists Picasso and Matisse.

This aquatint etching is a very good example of how graphic art can be inspired in one place, created in another, and its final results merged by both. I collaborated with a Hungarian friend, Ferenc Budyil, in Geneva at the Centre Internationale de Gravure Contemporaine in 1971. “Bougie” as we used to call him by his nickname, was a master technician in many fields, having been trained under a communist regime in all the graphic arts. He fled to Geneva and eventually became a Swiss citizen and, as far as I know, still lives there practicing his craft. Bougie etched this plate for me after I created the abstract image, but because I needed to return to an exhibit at the New York Public Library the following week, I decided to carry the copper plate with me on the plane and proof the image at a later date. As luck would have it, I met Lynne Aikman at Etcher’s Press in lower Manhattan, recommended by another well known printer Bob Blackburn, and we decided to do some experimental printing of several images, one of which turned out to be Easthampton Sunrise. For the trial proofing, in which we ran a number of different color combinations. I was tempted to imitate Monet’s defining various times of day or different seasons while exploiting the same subject, as with his haystacks or Rouen Cathedral paintings. Subsequently, I titled mine Easthampton Sunrise, Sunset, Dawn, Night, etc., since they have an airy beach-like quality of abstract sea animals or fish forms. I once lived in Southampton, Long Island, having been an art teacher at the Partida School of Arts when I returned from my studies in Europe about 1952. Early morning long walks along the endless beaches reminded me of the colors and shapes I see in this etching. The title seems totally fitting to me now, and the imagery unified despite the forms having been etched in Switzerland, printed in Manhattan and titled in California.

The New Mexico sunrise is unique to the Southwest. Its simultaneous brilliance and softness is surprising and unforgettable. I intended the blocked out letters to remind one of houses and random villages in a coded use of abstract dada poetry. This is one of my favorite lithographs for several reasons. As an example of perfection from a technical point of view, there are few blends merged with the textures coming from the sky area into the soft ground of melting gradations so delicately fused in any lithograph I have ever seen, by anyone anywhere. Credit goes to the collaboration of the master-printer team at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico where this edition was executed. The technical name, peau de crapeau, French for the skin of a toad, is the peculiar oxidation residue and crazing textures transitioning from the yellowing sun through the pink and into the red. The success of this procedure is often accidental, arrived at with a prayer and great deal of know how. In this case, our prayers were answered.

The shapes and forms of the plateaux, buttes, mesas, rock staircases and gullies at Canyonlands State Park in Utah are so supernaturally surrealistic that they hardly need an artist to interpret them as an abstraction. This fantastic mix of rims and mazes formed by eons of history and God’s supreme artistry has inspired the spirit of all who are lucky enough to have experienced being in their presence. And so it was that in the early ‘seventies when I traveled across the United States and stopped at Moab, armed with sketchbooks and paints, and climbed among the arches and rims to view the colorful sedentary sandstones where the Colorado and Green Rivers met, that I had a holy and physical feeling of my smallness and the endlessness of our planet. Though paint was hardly adequate to express the feelings I experienced, I had to get something down onto canvas to show myself that I was really there, that is was truly real and not a dream, and to scratch my finite place into the universe in any way I could, much as a caveman must have felt when he/she burned and etched their bisons into stone murals onto the cielings of Altamira.

I consider the Road to Arles one of my seminal artworks. First pieced together as a collage from hand-colored papers while living in Arles, France, it represents a breakthrough for me in terms of creating an emblematic work which synthesized a way of life and a relationship to nature. When first exhibited it at the Arles Museum Reattu in 1976, the Director, J.M. Roquette, wrote that it captured the spirit of Arles by an American in a way that no French artist had done. I was struck by the special light qualities of Arles, and depicted the vaulted Plane tree branches hovering in space on both sides of the provencal roads, to give the effect of filtering shadows, or a chromatic light at the end of a tunnel. Of course, any art created in Arles is, in my view, a paean to Van Gogh, who roamed the roads of these mystical rays of unreal light. There is a Gothic starkness to my interpretation of the Road to Arles that summarizes the darkness and light pervading the shimmering landscapes, the grey stone walls and arches, and the beautiful color laden fields of flowers and fruit trees of Provence, long described by poets from Roman times to the present.

Creatively speaking, 1982 was a formidable year for me. I was genuinely innovative, imaginative and creative in the graphic art field, as well as in the production of collages, writing and finding my art soul. Shuttling and jetting between Paris, New York and California, I was in the “swing” of letting art flow out of me, confidently and unfettered. That was the year that Beverly Hills Forest came into being. To say that this silkscreen is a tour de force of printmaking would be an understatement. The 48 individual hand-cut screens and squeegee passes required so much technical accuracy and planning that the mere thought of it today gives me pause to wonder how I could have undertaken such a difficult composition in this medium. . Be that as it may, with the collaboration of master-printer Jeff Wasserman and his crew, this complicated imagery came to fruition. The intended irony and humor, the myriad textures and unusual cartoon-like characterization of landscape, cityscape and moonscape, fuse the drama of biting wit, inevitably bringing a smile to the viewer’s face. I have seen this happen for over 25 years. The source of satire depends upon incongruity and irrationality, the elements that gave its name to the theater of the absurd, of which Beverly Hills Forest is a distinctive icon. The childish configurations and crudely shaped subjects of the composition, outlined by the faux torn paper contours are the actors in the play, the “bring in the clowns” final act.

The simple recording of objects referred to in Genesis of God having created the earth, the sea and all animals, was literally visualized here in the medium of collage. The beauty of the world and all His creations therein were impossible for a mere normal human to convey, but there is no reason not to try. What was it like in the beginning? That is an imposing question not only for scientists but for artists to imagine. After all, Leonardo gave it a try, why not Secunda? The activities between heaven and earth, distinguishing the earth from water and air, separating the green earth from the blue sky, forming the billowing clouds, the clear lakes and the winding rivers, is parallel on a smaller scale, of course, to the engagement an artist might evolve in expressing an epic landscape with those elements. Indeed, that is how I commenced utilizing my materials and gathering my thoughts, by forming symbols and pictographs of the vegetation, the fruit trees, locating objects and figuring the placement of rain, clouds, mountains, palm trees, electricity, animal movement and diverse abodes. The textures and the transitions from the rough and the smooth, the scents and insights of my intuition at the moment - whatever came to mind, went to work on making palpable what was in my head. For a disconnected time that stood still, I pretended I was (Forgive him Father for he knows not what he says) dare I say it, Him?

In a strangely precognitive way, A Good Morning relates to an experience I was to have about 2 years after the serigraph was conceived and executed in California. It makes one wonder when the real moment of experiencing creation takes place. I was in Osaka, Japan in 1987 traveling with an exhibition of my graphics when my friend and agent, Yasuo Iwasaki, suggested that I get a personal and intimate cultural introduction to the traditional Japanese way of life. We took the train to Kyoto where he dropped me off at the Kansai Seminary House and Temple with his son’s bicycle, a box of yen, and a bag of Arashiyama walking maps. His hope was for me to experience and discover the beauty and mysteries of the ancient temples and rambling walkways in my own way and by myself. Compositionally speaking, A Good Morning was derived from an experimental monoprint recalled from an Arizona sunrise at a California studio in 1985; however in the actual execution of this print, an identical mental image of the Kyoto region mapped in my brain to combine the familiar elements of the ribbons of light, the shifting juxtapositions of mountain forms and the inexplicable merging of visual solar phenomena of Arizona, Kyoto and Santa Monica. How to explain this recomposing and merging montage of past, present and future experiences? Albert Einstein said that time was invented so that everything would not happen at once. That I experienced life scenes in 1987 which I subconsciously (?) interpreted two years earlier suggests that life imitated art for me in an unimagined, semi-real and predestined way.The final look of A Good Morning captures a transitory moment for me. It’s almost as if I saw a fleeting glow of life as it might be recalled in a state of Nirvana. The mental picture was truly more than a mere remembrance of things past. No doubt I was in an elevated mental state of peace and happiness as my brain randomly accepted the task of summoning this composite visual data from the millions of other possible memories buried somewhere inside. The coloration brings up another related mental jog – and that is that, quite aside from the obvious happy subject matter, the tints, hues and blooms chosen to express my idea of a good morning, represent my most personal visual communicative equivalents to those buried inner feelings of joy, of awakening, and of looking on the bright side of what is defined as life. Mountains and their shadows are different everywhere and their complexities can be as daunting to explore visually as is the human visage. Yet, as artists, we attempt to extrapolate their essences and portray their eccentricities and particularities. The vetting, editing and interpreting may result in a merging not only of what we see as the actual contours, so much as our gut feeling combined with unconscious blurred desires to make real what we resolutely perceive of nature as it should be, in effect, in our eyes, to perfect it.

Paris, looking out my window on Boulevard Brune in the 14th arrondissment. My son Alexandre, just born, is lying quietly in my studio in his cradle, his mom Sandra admiring, while I sketch leaning over my terrace at 5 PM. The traffic is noisy, like a Gershwin honk and squeal from American in Paris. The smog rises and the scents of cheese and wine from the market below tempt me to go 6 flights downstairs to the café, take a break and imbibe in a Pernot or a shot of Calvados. But no, I want to finish what I am doing—trying to stop the action, the swift movement, the passage of flurrying events soon to disappear… always trying to fight time and catch the energy of the people, the bouncing buses, the small banged up cars and the pedestrians weaving in and out as in a maze. What a scene! I see it every day but how will I ever get the spirit of the animation and capture it all in one sweep, trying, trying, faster faster. My arm swirls with the action I feel. I close my eyes and draw lines of movement, yes, plain circular movement. That’s it. It makes no sense but that’s it. The color, what about the colors? They blur but they are there. I fade them into each other and see the passengers in the windows of the bus reading, sleeping, hanging on and standing. They blur again and I think now I’ve got it. Yes. I have captured “something”, liberated it, but what? I have temporarily frozen time, frozen images. Does it make sense? I’m going out at last for a drink now. I think I will leave it as is. Yes, that says something. It’s a tiny slice of my experience. Yes, but ?

Ancient Greece has inspired many artworks in the history of Art. This is true in terms of the physicality of the esthetics established in sculpture and in the arts, in the unique and enlightened philosophy, and even in our everyday language and mathematics. We garner the moral governance of our intellect and our concept of civilization and ethics according to their timeless studies. In sum, if one looks deep enough, as a historic phenomena, ancient Greece’s presence lurks somewhere behind every curtain of Western cultural life. Though it’s often not apparent, a long line of esthetic ideas extend from Aristotle to Pop art, sometimes in a winding road, but time and again clearly visible when understood. I have been fortunate to go to Greece and be awed by the magnificent sensation of viewing Mount Olympus. I feel as if I have experienced an unforgettable slice of charismatic history. This is a kind of challenge for me to prove the numbing fact of relating with this truth in some way. Of course, my way is to make a collage or a painting as soon as possible so as not to lose the feeling and the reality of the “being there”. Fantasizing about Olympus is tantalizing. The songs in the air, the charm, the legends and the pure visual color and shapes of the monumental peaks are wonders of imagery to organize and then, finally, to find the right composition. But to arrive at a structural blending of technique, style and subject, and to communicate this is a satisfaction beyond words. In this silkscreen, the bottom half of the hilltops are collaged painted papers: the concept being to give the appearance of extending the distance of the peaks as far away from the viewer’s eye as the gradations of light and the shading of rugged abstract mountain would permit. In contrast, the silhouetted jagged massive foreground forms are in distinction to the horizontal blended layers of soft infinite sky. The harmony of the whole is a symphony of fantasy becoming reality.

An unexpectedly aggressive charging stallion is nothing to be challenged. Especially when peacefully sketching outdoors in Oak Creek near Sedona dipping your brush into a watercolor jar, concentrating on the twittering birds above the tree tops. I think the cowboy said it was a 3 year old appaloosa. Though he had a rope and waved a short whip, the horse’s independent attitude persisted. Fortunately no one was hurt, and after a while the horse just stood by snorting and looked over at me as if to say,” I am ashamed of my behavior but that’s who I am.” I continued with my acrylics and hastily finished coloring the bright hues of the sunny Southwestern floral life, the swirling olive trees, the Ocotillos and Saguaros. It was a windy day. Perhaps that’s what riled the horse, but in no time, horse and rider were gone and I was once again left to my lonely craft in silence. Now I added some opaque coloration to highlight the form of the earth and tree. I wanted a sort of unfinished look to be able to remember the movement and vibrancy of the moment. Too much detail stultifies the action. Besides, both in color and execution, there is a kind of flaming look to the tree which echoes the spirit of the horse. That said, the difficult decision of when to stop actually painting took hold, and I put down my brushes and simply sat and thought about what had transpired. A nice moment of rest and contemplation.

Springtime in Northern Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Illinois - a time for planting, building, enjoying one’s family, the outdoors, the long daylight hours and colors, the animals, birds and each other. Now imagine it is before Manifest Destiny became the byword for the pioneers and American settlers. This is the juxtaposition I attempted to place myself into as I set out to depict an imaginary unspoiled landscape of the 17th and 18th century Chippewa tribe around the Great Lakes. Far from the fables of the noble savage or the ignorant native imagined by white explorers who thought European culture was the only measure of civilization, the native Americans often had a well organized social network and family life that was, in many ways, more civilized than their settler and adventurer counterparts of the time. In creating Chippewa Spring, the overall composition presented a particular problem to me requiring many revisions and basic changes in the geometric upright structure of the peeling trees against the horizontal masses of lake and land. As I discovered, this criss-crossing lends an unconscious cubist flatness to the whole, which gives it strength and a mural type of monumentality, much as one finds in early French tapestry or, closer to our times, in a Mondrian painting.. I was also hesitant to place the rendering of an actual moving figure on the island because (with the flying birds in the upper left hand sky) it was isolating the only living thing. In the end, I decided to include it and it ultimately enhanced the foliage, tree trunks and water by adding a mirror image of ourselves in our own environment.

I was able to use surrealistic symbols of wailing blues and sorrowful melodic waves of distant hopes and personal fears of the night by spacing these odd shaped bones of the soul floating as if seeking deliverance. The blues are universal. There are equivalents sung in every culture from the gypsies to the Indians. However the American blues are unique in that they come primarily out of an African slave culture. Despite being mixed with other influences, the meaning of our blues is a plea for liberation from pain or a sorrowful personal condition whose roots are enslavement of some sort. Everyone knows the emotions and feelings of pain and joy, hope and despair, and of the necessity to express feelings of anger and expectation. Poets and musicians have been able to do this most effectively because they sum it up without beating around the bush. When I hear Bessie Smith wail “Give me pigfoot, Pete” or Louis Armstrong in a plaintive supplication whisper, “Why am I black and blue?” I not only identify with the specifics of the words, but I can personalize it to my own blueness. Though there is a conventionalized harmonic format to the blues, the feelings expressed are not limited to a precise musical design. In effect, you know when you hear the blues. In the same way, in my Blues in the Night, against a nighttime background of particular loneliness, I present a foreground of aerial flying objects parallel to difficult emotions which might be words or sounds soaring in a gap between reality and illusion. As I say, the blues take many forms and I try to show as many corresponding objects and colors as fill eight bars of B.B. King, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin or James Brown.

This acrylic painting was executed a short time after I returned to my Arizona studio from a painting trip to Northern Spain on the Atlantic coast. I traveled with a Spanish friend, artist Joseph Breton, from Madrid to the seaside town of Santander, where we shared a workspace overlooking the ocean and the animated townsfolk going about their daily shopping and business. The energetic movements and high energy of the Northern Spaniards and basques, along with the high winds from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, lent an atmosphere of stimulating nervous vibrancy to the picture as a whole, which I found inspiring and compelling. The painting was carried out very quickly, in about an hour. It came pouring out of me as if I knew exactly how and what to put down (I often work on the floor) on the canvas board. I started at the bottom and worked my way up with the watery medium of acrylics I decided upon, almost as if I was doing a large watercolor. That way the colors would remain workable and in flux, as well as transparent . This way I could use my technical bag of tricks with a large brush, working quickly and at a distance from the ground so as not to get involved and seduced by small areas of “prettiness.” The large bamboo Chinese brush I like on occasions such as this, recalled my studies of Japanese calligraphy 40 years ago, and the seeking and finding of meaning in every stroke, leading to the next stroke, and so on. By the time I got to the sky area I felt the need for some opacity and squeezed paint directly from the tube in a few areas as personal autographs of my nervous system to embellish my egocentric satisfaction with the final result.

Sorrento, Southern Italy, near Naples, wafting Air of exotic flowers, mountaintop views of spouting Mount Vesuvius, the seductive odor of pasta sauce and fine wines, ruins from ancient Rome, ancient Greece and ancient Spain, cobblestone winding roads and castles, villas, night tourists and beautiful flirting well endowed women, recitations of Godfather dramas and rich heiresses abound and the black dresses and armbands of recent funerals carry on the ritual traditions of people’s recent history and cultural modulation. I painted this acrylic painting one summer night outside my modest cabin, a 10 minute walk from the Mediterranean Sea. The patrone had generously provided me with brilliant night lights so that I could see the grasshoppers and the moths and other night fliers buzzing noisily over my canvas while I worked to their symphonic vibrations. Some loved my work so much that they even got stuck into the paint while I worked, evidence that “we were both there”. The garden was rich with ivy and large Matisse like leaves of fluttering shapes over a grapevine trellis; in the night light the leaves veins glittered like skeletons in ebony monkish robes. The moon was full, however, and people came to stop and stare. Some would comment, “bravo”, while others were curious about the person doing the painting rather than what was being created under their noses. But the night was beautiful and my senses filled with the rapture of the moment. No words in my lexicon can describe the feeling of being lost in total oneness within the act of creation. It is like heavenly death on a raft of dreams.

In preparing to execute the theme for this monoprint I studied many Encampments in the Desert paintings by a host of artists from the renaissance to contemporary interpretations. There are paintings of nomads, gypsies, Native American tribes, Mormons, Romans and many others who “encamped” as such. However my own rendering is taken from the scriptures and represents in an abstract way, the long journey of the Israelite people from Sinai to the Promised Land. In all the versions I saw, it was the people rather than the desert itself which was the artists’ focus and principal subject. By contrast, I wanted to show the heat, the loneliness, the dunes and the vast unending light from the desert sun, in order that the huddled peoples’ dramatic plight was to be comprehended. I have been to many deserts in both the US and abroad, and have painted the cracked dry earth and the arid dunes of California, Arizona and Utah. The parched monotony and melding of color and heat is aptly described by T.S. Eliot in his great poem, The Wasteland, in which he describes the journey of the human soul seeking redemption, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In my Encampment, I show the roundness of the sun image as an unfathomable figuration that hovers overhead; while below, the hunched masses huddle together for protection and self preservation. I meant the three dimensional roundness of the sphere as a symbolic motif of time and space, while the loosely brushed abstract figures in the more cool colors, is expressive, to my mind, as an imaginary representation of hope, expectation and life.

Sunrise, Sunset, Sundown, Sunburst, Sun Dance, Hawaiian Sunset, these are a few names of my different works over the past 50 years with analogous themes. In a convoluted way, I think the effect of sun and light on my art may have started germinating in the esthetic region of my brain at the time of my Italian sojourn in 1956 when I was first exposed to renaissance art by living in its midst. Though the Venetians are renowned as great colorists in the depiction of light, the Florentine influence - Fillipo Lippi, Fra Angelico, and Botticelli, was greater on youthful me than were the Venetian School of Titian, Giorgione and Bellini. The fantastic draftsmanship (drawing abilities) of the Florentines coupled with controlled areas of color and shading, appealed to me at the time more than the masterful loose brushwork of the late Titian or Tinteretto. It was years later while visiting Venice that I came to appreciate those artists in an entirely different way, but that is another story. One may ask, with reason, what has all this to do with the thick, impasto, juicy painting reproduced here? In a way, art influence grows out of sidestepping, backward glancing, subjective hunches and urges as much as acceptance, imitation and approval. The monumental figural gestures of Michelangelo related Picasso to me. These and other like configurations blended in my mind. There was not much distance to traverse between symbols. My personal inventory of psychological art ghosts morphed deKooning into Tinteretto; Matisse into Botticelli; and Picasso as a Michelangelo. The sun is a round swath of light and an all giving energy source. It is the mother of all heat and warmth, and necessary to the life of plants, animals and all existence. It gives us light and, by extension, time and space. It gives shading and form to everything, and in a sense, is the center of our universe. As such, it is deserving of a significant place in the scheme of art things. I have tried to interpret what I can about my sunny feelings and life enhancing thoughts about it both as scientific reality and as an esthetic symbol. I am compulsive about reinventing the sun in art and will continue Looking, thinking, feeling and interpreting.