In this first decade everything was new and exciting. Every painting was a revelation for me. But I did not have the painting skills to reach many of my new ideas. I was trying to create new worlds andfigurative art was challenging to my education in abstract art. And learning to paint the real world was hard enough, but I was trying to grasp other worlds as well. If I wanted to paint other worldly figures or deities, my logic told me that they had to be masked or in costume. It would take me years to have the courage to paint these figures unmasked and without the trappings of costumes. As you can see, the early paintings use adequately painted, but often clumsy and short on detail. I would have probably continued along those lines for years except for one small serentipitous event that happened in 1979.

I went to a studio of a Spanish friend’s one afternoon and he was on all fours with open cans of paint and a large ball of crumpled aluminum foil all around a large canvas. He told me he was going to paint a landscape with large boulders and the quickest way was to cover the whole canvas with the texture of rocks. He dipped the crushed aluminum ball in different earth colors and pressed them on the canvas. The shapes were sharp and clear. Do that with 3 or 4 colors and you have the intricate texture of stone. Then you paint the landscape around it and with shadows and highlights in the rock texture, you have a wonderful impression of an elaborately painted stone texture. I thought I would try it once and see how it would work for me. The results changed everything in my work for several years. The sharp texture to the rock forced me to up my game with the rest of the painting by having to add more detail and texture. In this decade you will see that even a small amount of rock texture made a painting much more detailed and elaborate than that before 1979. Eventually I didn’t need the rocks anymore to produce the next step in my work. Welcome to 1975 to 1984!