In My Spare Time….

Ernest Bujok on my floor

When I was a student at Willams College in the ’70s, I was a double major in history and studio art.

I write often about  history, but rarely about the studio art.

I also rented a room from one of my professors, Tom Krens, who later went on to be the director of the Guggenheim Museum in NY.  It was a pretty interesting place to live.

My focus was on printmaking and I did editions for our Artist in Resident, Jim Dine.  We did the ‘bathrobe series’ that year, if you are familiar with his work.

My real passion as a student was for silkscreen printing and photography.  Whey I graduated in ’76, I received a fellowship from the Thomas Watson Foundation that allowed me to spend 3 years traveling all over the world photographing, all expenses paid.  The photography led to video, but the printmaking side languished.

Then, two years ago, my wife Lisa bought me a studio space on W37th Street in NY where I could resume silkscreen printing again after 30 years away.  

I go to the studio as often as I can (and as often as we are in NY), and I have begun to create a body of work I am getting closer to being happy with.  

Yesterday, I did a series on our friend Ernest Bujok.

I am greatly influenced by the work of Chuck Close.  I own one of his, but it’s one of the smaller ones. And it’s only one.

My own prints are big, 36×48, but not so big as I would like to get. Like I said, I am getting closer to what I want.

We have a storage space in the second bedroom, where most of the work of the past two years lives.  We have to have complete agreement before we frame and hang anything. And wall space is at a premium.

So before we consign them to the storage space, I like to spread them out on the living room floor to take a look.

A few get framed and hung in the office, which is a few blocks away. But how much can I inflict on the people who work for me?

Maybe next year Lisa will buy me a gallery?  My birthday is in October.