Way back in the 1950s, x-rays were actually film, developed in the lab. Each film sheet came to the hospital in a clam-shell cadmium yellow paper. It was tossed after the x-ray film was used. My father, being a surgeon in eastern Ohio, had access to it and would bring all that paper home. I always had a stack of paper to draw on from a young age as long as I didn’t mind drawing on the yellow paper.
Always in trouble in school because all I wanted to do was draw and not pay attention to the classes or teacher and sometimes I was given a stack of paper and sent to the back of the class to draw all day. Starting at age 9 I started flute and piano lessons and began a life-long path to unite the two forms of creativity.
After high school in Sharon PA, I went to Penn State University, my Dad wanting me to be an architect. Two weeks after I started at Penn State, I changed majors to Graphic Design from architecture because it was something I wanted to learn. No computers or Photoshop in the early 1970s. The weekend I came home from my freshman year in college, I got sick. Home on a Friday, 3 days later on Monday I started a summer-long journey fighting for my life, and came a hair’s breadth more than once of not making it. I remember the vision of my parents bringing my brothers and sister into my isolation room to say goodbye to me.
Somehow I survived that experience. I felt it was a hardware, software upgrade that I needed to get past the age 18 in this lifetime. It was the beginning of my Spiritual Life. I went back to Penn State made the Dean’s list and then left school before graduating because the message I got was that I needed to learn from and in life. I got married young, got divorced young and in 1976 I left Pennsylvania for the endless summer of Los Angeles. Thankful to my older half-brother Harry for opening that door.
After settling in, through a stroke of luck, I discovered the animation industry. Working for studios like Filmation, Hanna-Barbera, Ruby-Spears Productions I learned the every day grind of production art. I worked on Saturday morning TV shows like ‘ScoobyDoo’, ‘HeMan and the Masters of the Universe’, ‘PlasticMan’ ‘The Ghostbusters’. I did commercial freelance work and also ‘The Return of Pinocchio’ feature film from Filmation Studios and many other series that escape me in the windswept dusts of time.
This was the days of old technology where animation was done on paper with pencils. There were no animation computers or software at that time. I studied as much as I could with Glenn Villpu one of the most amazing figure-drawing/painting instructors of my life. Filmation Studios paid for anyone who wanted take classes from Glenn and after drawing all day in the studios, 3 nights a week I would take his classes. He taught figure drawing like calisthenics and that whether the artist was drawing in the classical sense like Rembrandt or drawing animation figures, the artist was not drawing on the surface of the paper but drawing around the figure in a cube of space. This insight stuck with me years later when I started working on computers.
In 1986, there was a resurgence in the animation industry caused by the release of the film, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”. I had big unresolved questions about life and death that had been germinating in me for decades and it was time to leave L.A. with my second wife Karen and move to Nevada County to study “The American Book of the Dead” with E.J. Gold. At that time it was a spiritual art school and for my first 3 years here I painted almost every day. Copying styles of Van Gogh, Diebenkorn, Ligier, Max Ernst, Kandinsky, Vemeer, and others the paintings were sold at art auctions to raise money for the local museum MAMA. I taught Saturday Morning art classes for kids in the area for MAMA. I am grateful for the tremendous wealth of experiences and learning there.
In 1986 I discovered computers (first exposed to by my brother Gary in 1983)! After leaving Los Angeles for northern California I started working with graphics computers. Working with a $15 program that came on a floppy I was introduced to the world of 3D graphics on an Amiga computer. I met Martin Hash maker of Animation Master after answering an ad in the back of Amiga computer magazine offering “Create Disney style animation in 3D”. I was hooked and worked as a beta-tester for 20 years (although not having the technical understanding of computers) and did projects for Apple Computers and Bose and 3D dinosaurs for Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, in Portland. Wired magazine wrote up the game “Dinosaur Safari” in the 1994 in an article called “CD-Roms that Suck” but noted that “Some of these dinosaurs are very nicely done”. Also a promotional animation project for Market Power and DPS Systems was accomplished in 1999.
With the start of the Internet I lost interest in all things non-digital. I stopped doing art. I didn’t read books any more. It seemed that all life could be created through the screen in front of me which connected to the world. I even hoped to get involved with VR but computers and software weren’t powerful enough in the 1990s. That changed in 2015 when I went on a group pilgrimage journey to Peru.
At the turn of the century I left the spiritual school I was involved in and started on my personal healing path looking yet deeper into those unresolved traumas and spiritual experiences that in my early childhood.
Growing up, music and art was about doing it right, reading the music. It was all very intellectual for me. When I was around 18, I set music aside for about 35 years. In the mid-2000s I reconnected with music after not playing for much of 35 years. Learning to jam with friends I discovered the emotional component of music which I had missed early on. As I like to say, I feel fortunate to have lived long enough to reconnect with music and art.
I now live in Hawaii where I work on painting and playing music in healing ceremonies. Both are long term running themes in my life. Who knew? I also am working to understand healing trauma, my own trauma and generational trauma as it affects me and our culture.
