About

Born towards the beginning of 1942 in Chicago,IL. When I started talking, no one could understand me. I also had trouble learning to read which was much later identified as dyslexia.

As a kid, I was eight when I got a kidney infection, which kept me in bed for around 6 months, which ended my never to materialize life in sports.

Before that my first grade teacher held me back half a year. She was mean and pulled the hair on my neck. My parents arranged for me to get music lessons. I wanted to play trumpet, but I ended up with trombone, which was easier for me to play. I played in an all accordion band, run by our local music teacher. It was difficult. 

I went to an all boys catholic high school called Mendel. I played in the band, and I had private lessons with a professional trombone teacher. As a sophomore I joined the all city Chicago CYO Concert  and Marching band. 

Jazz became my focus, and I joined a jazz rehearsal band, and found friends who played jazz.

I got a scholarship to a small catholic college in Quincy Illinois called Quincy College.

I had to sneak out of the dorm to play jazz with a local band, and my grades suffered which made my father very mad. He wanted to keep better tabs on me and asked me to find another school focused on something outside of music.

So I picked architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology. They told me my grades weren’t good enough for architecture, how about downstairs in the Institute of Design?

I said fine and I loved it, especially photography, which became my major. The commute was difficult, so I moved to the apartment building near to the school known as “Dirty Thirty”. It was what helped me learn more about art since there I was surrounded by fellow ID students. I also started painting on my own. My photo teacher  was Aaron Siskind, who was already famous for his abstract expressionist photographs.

As a junior at ID, my girlfriend Donna got pregnant, we had a “shotgun wedding”, arranged by my father and we moved to the married dorms, paid for by my father. As a senior I had a one man show called “Retrospective of a Student”, and I began making 8mm movies. I was clearly not ready for marriage and fatherhood, but I didn’t know it.

I continued there at ID to do my masters degree. After I finished my course work, with my teacher’s help, I got a job at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, teaching photography and two dimensional design. While I worked on my Master’s Thesis, a 16mm color film called “My Neighborhood”, I became close friends with Tom Wright, who bought one of my paintings, and was director of the jazz band. He was a composer who agreed to do the music for my thesis.

UWM was not such a good fit and I was let go just as I showed one of my black and white 16mm movies called “Roslyn”, and was offered a job at The Art Institute of Chicago to teach filmmaking in 1967. We moved both kids back to the southern edge of Chicago, so Donna could be nearer to her mother and sister. In Milwaukee I rented a store front and started doing action paintings, so when we moved back to chicago, I filled the walls with new paintings.

I became more political and worked closely with Jon Jost on a 1968 film about the Democratic Convention in Chicago. We were arrested together while visiting the site where the Convention was to be held.

After that I slowly became a hippie, my hair grew and I bought more drugs. My efforts at making anti war movies didn’t work out and Donna was getting more upset with my affairs. Just when it looked like our marriage was going to end, I received an invitation from Jon Jost to come to

Calif. and make movies. The whole family moved in a rented truck with our stuff to start over.

Jon and I made plans as we brewed beer, oatmeal stout, and stayed a little drunk. I fell in the woods with Jon’s camera and needed to pay a lot to fix it. That messed up our plans and we grew apart.

I started looking to make sense of life and ran across Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, which started to change me. Then I met Curly while out hitchhiking on the coast highway. We hit it off and he brought me up to see his house/cave in the mountains with his young wife and baby daughter. I was transformed by that visit and I somehow found my way back to see them again.

My plans changed and I started looking for land where I hoped to follow Curly’s lifestyle. We finally found a man with land for sale and he liked what I wanted to do. Donna and I decided we had to stop paying rent so we moved into the front yard of where we were renting while a group of young hippies who made leather clothes for rock stars moved in and let our kids sleep in their school bus. 

It was thanks to meeting Curly that I wanted to do the same, ie, buy land, build a house and live in pursuit of self-discovery mixed with Gurdjieff and phenomenology, and drugs. Building the house took me a couple years. The first year I framed the walls and finished the roof,  then covered the walls in plastic and rested. That was hard on all of us.

As that progressed, I met Gary Lundblad, who gave me a book by Silo called “The Inner Look”. It was through Gary that we met Petur and Fernando, Nicole and Estrella in Berkeley, who were also part of Silo’s Movement. The pressure of this task created a great strain on our marriage, and in that search for meaning we split up and I had to leave so that Donna and the kids could keep the land and house. I left with just a sleeping bag and I was upside down with unknowns.

Gary said there was a retreat outside of LA, so we hitchhiked down there to join that retreat. That retreat did it for me because Silo’s writings opened my mind and heart. That was July in 1973, when my father was killed in a robbery during that retreat. My mother committed suicide in Sept. that same year. I lived in Solana Beach with Charles Lasater, where I worked as a roofer with Charles. I managed to save enough to go on a round trip excursion flight to Argentina in Nov. where I met Silo.  

In Argentina I met Selene, who was to become my second wife. I was invited back in January of 1974 for a retreat on the Crafts and Disciplines. After that retreat I went to Buenos Aires to find Selene and ask her to join my life. She agreed and we went to Chile to meet her family.

We later took a bus to Lima and thanks to money from my father’s estate, I bought two one way tickets to Miami. In Miami Selene was refused entrance into the US, and sent home to Chile. 

Later I received more money and bought her a round trip ticket to Vancouver, where Mort and Mary drove me to pick her up, and take us back to Portland to live. 

At the local library in Portland I saw a free live drawing class, and asked to join. After many tries and errors I submitted a self portrait that was well received, and used to advertise the next class. We moved to the Bay area to be around more friends. We found a small house to rent in El Cerrito, near Berkeley, where I kept trying to unsuccessfully draw Selene.

I went to the Canaries for a big conference given by Silo, where it was decided to open the US by sending all of us out from Calif. There were 4 of us in our team sent to Chicago. We packed our cars and pulled U haul trailers, and drove to Chicago in 1978. We found a 3 bedroom apartment by the lake and it started snowing. It was 8 ft. of snow that covered everything and shut down the city. We eventually found jobs and separate apartments and a locale for the Synthesis Institute. We worked hard to make connections with the people in our neighborhood. Selene and I were together for 7 years when we decided to break up as friends.

There was a big event in Golden Gate Park in Francisco at the Hall of Flowers which we rented. Silo was invited to give his first public talk in the US there and I borrowed a ¾ inch video camera in Chicago to tape the show. I also invited my friend Frank to come and do the sound.  We rented trolley car buses to advertise all over the city and it was on the trolley that I first noticed Maureen.. Frank and I were busy tapping all the events until the end when there was a party in the gym of the YMCA, where all slept. I asked Maureen to go out to dinner with a group of friends and she accepted. We later walked and talked and kissed. We spent the whole night together and I was very moved. 

She was from New York City, so we had to plan our meetings. I went to NYC, and she came to stay with me in Chicago. We eventually planned to live together in New York, so I had to pack up everything and she came to help me move in Dec. of ‘82. 

We found out that we had to find the newspaper’s when they came out very early in the morning. After a long search we ended up in Queens. A one bedroom apartment on the top floor of a six story building with an elevator. We had a view from the kitchen window across a sea of two story family homes all the way to the Manhattan skyline where the sun rose on one side and set on the other.

It was there in our bedroom that I began to paint inside a clear plastic collapsible tent. There was no  room for paint splatters there. I worked at  painting bigger paintings, until arriving at a triptych of 6x6 ft paintings. 

I had had good jobs in Chicago working in photo labs so that's where I looked for work in New York. Maureen was teaching high school so I tried to get a license in teaching photography. Then we both had summers off to drive across the US and visit my kids on the west coast. We camped  all the time, driving on small state highways. I had an image of fixing the mess of my first marriage by doing it again with Maureen. We scouted places as we crossed America, and decided on Santa Fe, New Mexico. So we left Queens in early July of 1990 in a very big moving truck. When we got to Santa Fe we put all our stuff in storage and camped in the mountains until we could find an apartment. I wanted to build a house like in 1971 with Maureen, so I needed to find land to build on.

Maureen started teaching elementary school Special Ed. While I found a job in an organic market where I was a butcher’s helper, while I searched for land. There was a tremendous amount of salad stuff and veggies thrown away everyday and sorted through it and brought it home, it was all that we could eat.

For around 2 years I was driving around and talking to people or riding with many, many realtors.  They would take me to see land which I had to give up on looking for anywhere near Santa Fe because we couldn’t afford it. We only had the money from my retirement package, which I turned in before we left NYC. 

Finally I ran into Steve who was living on Wolf Rd. near Highway 14. He had built his own house but his wife had left him in the process. He told me about a realtor who owned a lot of land further out on Wolf Rd. named Gene Shelton. So after many rides with other realtors, I was able to talk with Gene and arrange to meet him on land he had to sell. He drove me through the dry river bed in the setting sun through canyons to show me the land he had to sell.

We put down a big deposit on 15+ acres and started planning. Our first building sight was off the road into the hills. Later we noticed that the hill kept that area in shade all winter. So I needed a way to get into the land from the top of the hill. I had an old pick up truck I bought from the husband of Maureen’s fellow teacher. It was an old Ford F150 truck with a camper.  We walked and tried to plan a route through a mile of hills and valleys to get to the top of our land. Next was the money we were spending on rent, so we had to move again. Maureen had an old big canvas tent, so we picked a spot and built a platform for the tent. It was big enough for our double bed, a chair and desk and boxes for our clothes. The rest went back into storage.

We moved on to the land on April 4th, 1992. I had already started a second building site looking away from the river canyon and on a west facing hillside. The land was high desert with very little topsoil and mostly rock. A little over a mile above sea level, but lower than Santa Fe. I worked on the land and Maureen couldn’t drive our 2 wheel drive Toyota on the new road, so she had to walk up the hill about 400 feet. That was hard for her while going to town to work everyday.

My friend Sergio from Staten Island, NY, came to visit. He was a painter who played guitar with me as we experimented with free music. He carefully looked over my new building site and said no. We need a flatter, move level building site. We had bought all the wood we needed for several buildings from a paper factory that was closing in Santa Fe. We used those beams to plan the floor of our studio, our first house. Sergio stayed until the floor of the studio was up on blocks and cement pillars of various heights. Then I asked Steve, who was a professional carpenter, to come and frame the house with his friend. I planned where all the windows would go so that the house would be passive solar, and in two days they finished framing the walls and the roof. Two friends from town who I played free music with, came to see the house and Dave Nielsen, the bass player, said he would like to help. So with Dave’s help we began closing the walls with plywood on the outside.

After the studio was finished, I worked on a series of painting collages using the leftover building materials as the base of the painting. Later Dave built his own house and I made 2 paintings with his leftovers. Dave also invited me to go along with him and Sandy Brown on river rafting on his boat, if I could bring my trombone. We went where no cars could go, pristine wilderness.

I went on to do more paintings on weathered plywood that was collected from the trash of art shippers. I would paint white 4 ft. circle on the plywood and make the painting inside that circle.

Then with Daves help I began working on the foundation for our main house. I asked a backhoe driver I knew to help dig away the side of a hill where Dave and I could start creating the 12 inch thick walls against the other half of the hill. This house would also be passive solar, but out of the strong winds that beat up the studio and we found out after it was finished that barrels of water left inside for the winter didn’t freeze. While we were working on this foundation, Maureen and I decided to get married after living together for 18 years in the year 2000.

By 2002 the house was finished enough for my sixtieth birthday party. By 2003 Maureen got a job teaching in upstate New York, so she could be near her youngest daughter Christine who was trying to get pregnant. When that job didn’t work out, Maureen and I moved back to New Mexico. After a year Maureen went to the city to get a job and found a big apartment to live in in Brooklyn. I packed up most of our stuff and moved there in 2005.

 Thanks to being back in NYC I was able to go to weekly Message meetings, and reconnect with many friends. In 2007 I joined a pilgrimage to Punta de Vacas Argentina to be with a large group of friends from all over the planet and to hear Silo speak. By 2009 I began the leveling process in preparation for some big internal work.

Over the next many years, I would spend my falls in New Mexico, painting and playing music with Dave and Al. Last year we sold the property in New Mexico, after more than a year of trying

since it was still a pretty primitive lifestyle like no running water or central heating. I had to admit to Maureen that that lifestyle was too hard on my eighty-one year old body.

Now I’m 82 and ready to move on.