My Art Makes Me

During my 'learning how to draw' years (1960's) my first erotic drawings were done in pencil - and lots of erasing. Worked me to an erection. It was a damned good way to learn.

Drawing is a reinventing of the wheel. I found I let my imagination go, and in the now of full focusing. The human figure was a thing I was touching as I drew. Tactile. In my case it was prurience, curiosity and, yes, the impermissible as to the subject matter I had chosen. It was from these sessions I learned the schemas, built the repertoire that bettered my drawings . From pencil and erasor to pen and no erasing, I rapidly got the knack as to how many lines I had to make and at what stage of the dancing and adding lines to desist, stop. Stopping , I had come to understand would occur either because I was stymied and didn't know where I was, or that some 'muse' or other self tapped me, signalled me in some subliminal way to back off,

It eventually evolved that I filled many storebought black drawing books. I'd put some pages on the copier, print them in black and white. I'd make small editions and play at using 'book art' as a way of exhibiting them.
I sent them out as e-mail art and as book art.

Doing all my drawing and making editions was done in the privacy of my studio. It was not anything I felt comfortable taking to a commercial printing place to do. Those were the days before Kinkos and other such establishments. My images as you see here were too (?) .....

I have since the 1980's accomplished seeing this body of work received and taken seriously as art. *(See below)

What I'm getting at is that the processing of housing these drawings in books, copier printed books, designing these books, first as (Malraux's) 'galleries without walls' influenced not only my evolving as self styled ' pornographer-making-art' but set in place a concurrent symmetry of eventually learning how to become a 'book artist'! Book art entailed more than the book as exhibition space.

The give and take entailed in the assembling a signature (folded sheets of paper printed front and back) had its own esthetic and architecture and symbolism. The work, making drawings, accompanying texts, fabricating one of a kinds and small editions impacted, affected my sense of an identity that transcended the particularities of the processes. (Facture.)

It in fact, raised questions I had not thought or was able to pose. All very daunting and, till recently, unresolved.

The work of those formative middle years fashioned the artist-person posting this blog.
It transpired in the decade, the years of my fifties. I believe that it is 'culminating', this art I do is now allowing me to quite another level of expression and self-identity.
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Some collections containing my book art works are:

The Museum of Modern Art, NYC
The Brooklyn Museum, NYC
The New York Public Library Print Collection on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, NYC
The Kinsey Institute on the campus of Indiana State University, Bloomington