High school didn’t grab me, at least not in an academic way. Actually, I thought as a program of education the experience was a joke. My mind during this time drifted off, searching for more interesting, stimulating terrain, wanting to cut an alternative, creative path that was informed by my interests in music and intoxication. I realized after I had graduated that I needed to engage in a more serious study of art and should try some college. I began taking art classes at Art Center College of Design, while fulfilling my general education requirements at the local community college, College of the Canyons. After a couple of years I picked up an AA degree in Art, and acquired a little bit of insight, confidence, and technique through the half dozen life/figure drawing classes. In addition to drawing and painting I was very much into photography. My first job after high school was at a photo shop, and sometimes I’d acquire equipment in place of a paycheck. I set-up a darkroom in my parent’s laundry room and spent many, many hours in the dim red-amber light, bent over trays of chemicals, watchings images emerge burning on wet paper.
I was interested in exploring the modes of visual art as forms of cognition, and I engaged in various approaches of image making as ways of acquiring knowledge and understanding through a subjective experience of perception and thought, a type of thought that was both visually symbolic and visually textural or tactile. Because of this there was something very attractive and challenging about painting. It seemed multidirectional and unlimited in its potential.
This is the period when I ingested mushrooms for a sustained duration. Also of influence were the creative relationships I had with a few friends. We would get drunk, go on road trips, stay in weird motels, watch movies, listen to music, have stimulating conversations, experiment with intoxicated states, make art, eat, sleep, try to avoid responsibilities, and heave through life, dealing with ourselves and others, figuring out who we were and what we cared about. Sometimes I was euphoric, other times I was depressed, sometimes I was emotional, other times I was indifferent, but it was a great time, filled with ideas, impulses, influences, and insights. There was something very potent and special in these eclectic, subjective experiences, something that my art practice was deeply informed by. There was something about the feel and presence of this time that I wanted to capture in my subsequent artwork, something that would manifest itself in strange and murky atmospheres. If this time had been a space and my visual art an audio recording, than it was the particular sonic imprint, with the reverb and echo characteristic of that room, that was so important to the piece. And I would try to call it up in many later pieces, through a felt memory, and in the form of texture.
After a stimulating visit to San Francisco, I applied to the San Francisco Art Institute, was accepted into the school, and eventually packed up my car to move up there and engage in further study.