Art

I was fascinated by Auguste Rodin’s work, and tried to pattern my approach after him.  I think he’s my hero, along with Thomas Jefferson and Beethoven.  I went for those guys because they broke the mold, like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, two more of my heroes.  And then of course there’s Einstein.​

I was pretty sure I was going to make sculpture my life’s work, but thinking about it I realized I’d be stuck in a room with a cold, north light and a big piece of rock and maybe a pretty model, and considering how hard Art was to make a living at, I decided to write operas instead.  I figured that was a clear field.  American operas are rare.  And I’d be surrounded by singers, dancers and musicians, and I’d get to drink champagne and wear tuxedos and hang out with Leonard Bernstein.

So I enrolled in San Francisco State College, studying music theory and composition.  I didn’t do well, there.  I’m not made for classrooms.  All I’d do in class was pretend to take notes.  Actually, I was drawing.  I dropped out of college and moved to Berkeley.  There was some interesting action there, as it was about the time of the free speech riots.  I lived rent-free in the basement of a guy who was running for mayor on the Socialist ticket. I  bought a book called “How to Draw and Paint” and did everything it said: stretched my own canvases, sized them, did all the exercises it recommended.  Painting in a basement doesn’t work very well, though.  When I took the paintings outside, they’ looked completely different.  So, I moved into the top floor of a duplex on Milvia Street, which, by the way happened to be facing in the backyard the guest house where Jack Kerouac had written “On The Road”, which I’d just finished reading.  I took a part time job racking balls at a pool parlor so I could afford to pay the rent.

In the tenth grade I drew a comic strip for the school paper.  And I kept on sculpting, too.  I’d carry a ball of plasteline with me wherever I went.  I’d take it out and do something with it whenever there was nothing happening, such as when I was waiting for the principal to give me detention. I was always in trouble.

Another problem I had to overcome was the fact that I’m slightly color blind:  Faces would tend to be green, and I wouldn’t know it.  I solved that by never using green paint out of a tube.  If I wanted to paint a tree, I’d make the green myself.

I’ve always had an especially hard time with everything I’ve tried to do.  I wanted to be a musician, but I don’t have a particularly good ear.  I’ve managed to become a pretty great piano player, though, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.  I do okay with the guitar; and I write good songs.  I became an outstanding athlete even though I was one of those original ninety-eight pound weaklings to begin with.  I’ve made it pretty big as an actor in spite of being terminally shy.  I’ve always envied my brother Keith, who can do just about anything without trying very hard.  Invariably, I had huge obstacles to overcome in anything I tried.  Had to work against my genes to achieve my dreams.

Anyway, I produced fifty-two oil paintings during that period.  Taking a page from Uncle Will and my own libido, which has always been over-active, I painted mostly partially draped nudes.  by the time I got to the fortieth or so, I was doing pretty good.  None of those paintings are extant, except maybe the little one that I sold for $50.  All the others were stored for years in my father-in-law’s garage, but by the time, years later, when I tried to track them down, they had disappeared.  All of my early sculptures are gone, too, except for one figure I did when I was seventeen, which my mother had saved.  It’s not one of my best.

I moved back to San Francisco, and found Jack’s Beatniks, what was left of them.  A year or two later, the scene in North Beach had gone flat, the few vestiges of it having moved underground in the Portrero District, which later grew into the Haight-Ashbury.  I hitchhiked down to Venice, California, and lived hand to mouth with the   that hung on down there; the “Holy Barbarians” as we were called.

I hitchhiked to New York, where I started to make money as an actor.  I was living on unemployment insurance in a furnished room on Central Park West, painting and looking for acting jobs, when I got drafted.

I spent two years in the Army, mostly in Fort Eustice, Virginia.  There wasn’t any war to go to.  1960.  Korea was over and Vietnam was just a distant brush fire.  I worked in ‘Training Aids’ as an illustrator, drawing pictures of helicopters, maps, charts, etc.  Artists don’t join The Military.  The Army can train a draftsman, but they can’t train an artist.  They have to use civilians for those jobs at high pay.  So, if they find a draftee who can draw, they snap him up, for $75 a month plus room and board.

I created a cartoon series for some of the dull classes.  It featured a buck Private, modeled after me, a beautiful blonde, modeled after Marilyn Monroe and a mean Sergeant, modeled after my mean Sergeant.  I also started a theater company, and we toured around the Army Posts on the East Coast with musical comedies.  I designed the posters, and some of the sets and costumes.

After I got out of the Army, I went back to New York, where I got a job with an Art Agency.  I quit it when I got my first acting gig, a production of Hamlet in a Mall in New Jersey.  A year later, I was starring on Broadway.

After that, I rarely picked up a brush again.  I always had my paints with me, but my mind was on my acting career.  I briefly got it going again when I did a mini-series on the life of Gaugin.  I had a marvelous opportunity there.  A Parisian artist produced several copies of Gaugin’s stuff for us.  If he had signed them, they’d be considered excellent forgeries.  Some of them were done as unfinished, and I was supposed to work on them in the movie.  The result of that was I learned how to paint like Gaugin.  I think that stuck with me.  I’d always thought I was mainly a cartoonist, not a fine artist.

All this time I was still painting.  I did a few murals in bars and hotel lobbies, and hung a couple of my paintings in The Gashouse on Ocean Front Walk: partially draped nudes, of course.

Then, in the fall of 1996, I discovered the graphics program in my Apple computer.  I started drawing, using the track pad on my laptop.  At first the stuff looked like a four year-old’s doodles, or as though I was drawing with my left hand, or was dead drunk; but in a few days I got it together.  A week later, it looked just like my pencil drawings, and after awhile, just like my oils.  In a way, it’s a more direct technique than painting with a brush.  I’m doing it with my index finger.  No tool between me and the painting.  Straight from my brain and down my arm to the “canvas”.  I miss the smell of turpentine, though.