Art Student

Posing near the school in 1974



When it came to art schools there were two choices for a budding Florida artist back in the early 1970s- the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale and the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. Ringling had prestige along with an excellent fine arts program while the AIFL, the Florida offshoot of the Art Institute of Pittsburg, offered mainly commercial art.

I couldn't afford to attend either without a roommate. And the roomie would also have to provide transportation as the closest thing I had to a car at the time was a bicycle.

Several of my fellow art students at Jupiter High picked the AIFL over Ringling so my choice was made.

 The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale ca. 1974. This impressive looking
 building was actually a Holiday Inn. The school occupied the bottom
two floors in the foreground. The brochures offered an early lesson in
the deceptive art of advertising.caption

The school was very small when we arrived and had been open for just five years. There were some excellent teachers from the Pittsburg school there; namely Michael Angelo DiVincenzo, the life drawing teacher who started teaching at the Art Institute of Pittsburg in 1947.

After running through my savings and in spite of holding two part-time jobs I had to leave the AIFL just short of the halfway mark for Palm Beach Junior (now State) College where I majored in English Literature. From then on I took art classes wherever I could get them - from the Armory in West Palm Beach to the Corcoran in Washington.



Painting at the studio of a friend, sculptor Luis Montoya.

I spent the next three decades working in print media as a political cartoonist (Palm Beach Post, Copley News Service syndicate, The Hill in Washington,) illustrator (Palm Beach Life and The New York Times) and Art Director.

I started more serious studio work in 1988 with a series of minimalist paintings in oil paint and plaster on wood and branched out to large scale painting and sculpture. 

The minimalist works (1988-1994) are still among my personal favorites. But I get bored (or anxious) easily and move on to other ideas and mediums. As disparate as my work appears to be, there's a common thread through it all from which I've never wavered.