In the late 1960’s my life took a dramatic turn. As the Vietnam conflict deepened I was drafted into the United States Marine Corps in 1968. During my time overseas I made a conscious decision to devote my life to Art in response to the destruction and horror of the war. At the end of my deployment and after returning home in 1971, I enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to study painting. While at the Academy from 1971 to 1975, my instructors included Morris Blackburn, Will Barnet, Arthur De Costa, Marshall Glasier and many other teaching artists. Morris Blackburn had been a student of Arthur B. Carles who had been a student of Matisse. This was also the beginning of my twenty-year struggle with war-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This manifested as periodic panic attacks, insomnia, migraines and severe ringing in the ears. I tried to combat these symptoms by myself so I could focus on my art. My studies were progressing well. In 1974, I won the coveted Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which sponsored a summer of art study and travel in Europe. My work was slowly evolving from the traditional style taught at the Academy into my own abstract style. At the time I was making earth-toned paintings from powdered stone, marble and sand mixed with clear acrylic medium applied with brush and palette knife on boards.

On my Cresson trip I was most impressed by the Monet water lily paintings in the Musee I’Orangerie building behind the Louvre. The luminous color and the scale of the paintings brought over a sense of expansiveness and calm. My sand paintings were an exploration of the biomorphic with a strong visceral aesthetic. I was trying to achieve a sense of energy fused with space. After experiencing the Monets my aesthetic shifted towards the goal incorporating a dynamic sense of luminosity that was also tactile. My day job during this time was as an art handler at the Pennsylvania Academy’s Museum from 1975 to 1980.

I continued to show my work in Philadelphia in various shows from 1972 to 1982. While still a student I was invited to the PNI Annual Art Show at the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper and won second prize for painting. To earn the income I needed in my student days I worked as night security at the Academy. Upon completing my studies at the Academy I entered the Philadelphia University of the Arts to study Aesthetics. I was interested in developing a painting method that was intuitive and Benedetto Croce‘s writings were important to me at the time. I was a teaching assistant from 1976 to 1977 and showed and sold my work in 1979 through the Gallery 401 in Magnolia, NJ. The sand paintings I was making at the time had an archaic feeling to them, an influence from my travels in Greece and my Greek family background. The space around a figure was always extremely important to me and the figure ground idea evolved in my mind through my own personal sense of art history from Turner, Whistler and Monet to the all over painting of Pollack and the action painters to the monochromes of Reinhardt and Yves Klein.

My academic studies continued with graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. I was a teaching assistant from 1980 to 1981. While pursuing my graduate studies I was also beginning to show professionally. My first one-man show was a series of Vietnam-related works at the Race Street Gallery, Philadelphia in1979. The work received a hostile reception and some of the pieces were actually vandalized. This disturbed me deeply. One of my day jobs in 1979 was helping to varnish a series of paintings on the life of George Washington in the Capital Building Rotunda in Washington, D.C. In 1980, I participated in a group show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Another solo show followed, in 1981, at the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts in Camden, NJ. This show was my first presentation of a work with a more minimal but lyrical vision. Working as an installation assistant in the 1980’s at Smith-Kline & French and Thomas Jefferson Hospital installing their collections I was getting some money together to move to New York.

After receiving my M.F.A from the University, I exhibited my work in the graduate show at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1981, I moved to New York and completed my studies as an out-of-resident student. I returned to University of Pennsylvania as a one day visiting critic in 1984. At this point I was doing mature art. I was experimenting with new materials to evoke a dynamic compression and expansion of space, creating complex textures with hot and cool colors. My first job I had in New York in 1981 was with Force Five Design, a fabrication shop, one of our projects was constructing Walter De Maria’s “I Ching” wood sculpture. White lacquered and polished it as shown in Paris. I also worked once again as an art handler in transporting the Studio Museum of Harlem to its new location. In 1982 and 83 installing and transporting of art works for satellite galleries throughout the Bronx helped me to later get a position as art handler at Judson Art Warehouse in Long Island City NY in 1988. My painting at this time owed a lot to the influence of action painting as an energy made visible as a kind of Heraclitian flux.

In the 1980’s the East Village where I lived had a lively gallery scene. I showed at the Storefront of Art and Architecture Gallery, the Caidoz Gallery, Kwok Gallery, Public Image Gallery and P.A.D.D. from 1982 to1991. I supported myself at the time working as an art handler. In 1986, I had the opportunity to work as an art therapist intern for a year at a therapeutic community called Burch House in New Hampshire under the supervision of Dr. R.D. Laing, the famous therapist and author. Transpersonal psychology afforded a method to study areas of creative consciousness. In 1987 I worked as an artist-in-residence at a Theosophical Summer Camp near Hudson, NY.

My wife Alyssa and I moved to Brooklyn in late 1987. I feel one of the most disruptive elements to my Art was the repeated moves due to the sale of buildings we lived in and big rent increases while dealing with post-traumatic stress. I had to move eight times while living in New York and six times in Philadelphia over a thirty-year period. Like many other artists in the late 1980’s migrating to the boroughs of New York City, I experienced financial difficulties during this time. In July 1989, a flood occurred in my basement studio space in Brooklyn, a large portion of my works on paper and canvas were destroyed. I received at the time a Gottlieb emergency assistance grant to color copy some of the work before it was destroyed by mold. During my time in Brooklyn I was unable to secure a teaching position so I returned to art handling.

In the 1990’s color became the focus of my work, which was evolving more towards monochrome. Painting for me is a state of being and the work has a life of it’s own. Painting and drawing showed me my state of being and helped me get through hard times. The care in the work sets the rhythm and harmonic of the visual space structure. It is about a condensation of inner vision, inner sensations expressed not as a reduction but an intense short hand of dynamic interpretations. These interpretations of revealing and hiding are of change and therefore meanings are in a fluid state of becoming. The dimensions of the canvas as geometric boundary or primary structure was an idea for me that assisted me in creating a painting reality that is stable in its primary element but changing in its surface configurations.

Ms. Christine Brodbeck, a modern dancer, commissioned me to produce the stage scenery for her dance performance at DIA Art Foundation in New York in 1990. Other collaborative projects included La Lucha Continua, a mural at Avenue C and 9th St. that was finished in 1985. This was through P.A.D.D, a group of progressive artists headed at the time by Lucy Lippard. In 1991, I participated in Komar and Melamid’s School of Bayonne, an open artists forum. Also in 1991, I created an installation piece at Fashion Moda, Bronx, New York called “Order and Disorder.” I really enjoyed this show that took place in a broken down hardware store. The opening was well attended by artists and the documented archive was given to Franklin Furnese and later to NYU. One of my goals over the years was to produce painted environments and installations that created ambient space for the viewer. But due to financial difficulties and lack of space I returned to painting small works. I continued working with the unconscious in order to develop my own visual lexicon but on a smaller scale.

In 1996, I received a one year teaching position in Pusan, South Korea and while there showed a painting installation at the Manif International Art Fair, Seoul, South Korea. My interest is Asian Art began while I served in Vietnam and traveling in Japan and Korea. It gave me a deeper understanding of the Zen aesthetic. My type of work was accepted in Korea as integrative rather than reductive. They understood the cosmic imagery as perceptually changing and indefinite. Just before September 11, 2001, we moved to Sunnyside, Queens, because rents in Brooklyn became prohibitively high for us. I started working at the Guggenheim Museum as a security guard in order to get health insurance for my wife and myself.

My work in the past decade has transformed to a flow, sometimes linear in nature that is not separate from a vision of light and space. Forms appear and disappear like galaxies of sound moving through and within an illuminated space or energy field created by color.

In 2007, I was having serious eye problems and had my right eye operated on for cataract. This had been developing over a five year period and effected my perception of color in the blue and purple range making blue look blue gray while making reds more intense. This year, I will be having my left eye operated also for cataract. My painting was interrupted for three months while I adjusted to the change in perception. My wife Alyssa has been a great support to me through hard times and her sincere enthusiasm for my work for the past thirty years has been inspiring. Sadly, she has become unemployed during the economic downturn. She is a talented writer and has maintained a positive energy while working on a book.

Pieces from my recent Consciousness in Action series were shown in 2005 at the 39th Juried Exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY and in Italy in 2007 and 2008 through the Trevisan Art Gallery’s Spirit in Art show in Ferrara, Italy, and also in Bologna, Italy. These shows highlighted my thinking in terms of points, circles, and elliptic shapes in color. My work was accepted for itself and the reaction to me was as an artist as opposed to my own country's interest in what one's day job happens to be. In total I’ve shown in almost fifty shows through the years. As opposed to the notion of the industrial aesthetic of American minimalism with its supposed logic and rationality my work has a more Zen like attitude, the emphasis being on the proper place of man in nature, that man and nature are not separate but one. In painting as a form of meditation the goal of the artist is a mind empty of distraction. It is meditation because there is only one thought, there is only the painting being painted. The materialism of the Art world has driven artists to restrict their discourse solely to the materials and process that make up the physical existence of the painting and its literal concept a fabricated illustrational notion.

A high point for me in my life as an artist was a one-day visit to Brooklyn College back in 1992. Through a friend, the graduate students invited me to be their visiting critic. I really enjoyed meeting and saying hello to Jack Flam, whom I had admired for years through his books on Matisse. I visited with each student’s studio individually. Speaking with them gave me hope that painting was still being pursued as a serious art form.

After forty years of practice painting has become for me an experienced, emotive reality. This reality is embodied through color, light and form. It is predicated on an intuitive process, which is dependent on empathy and an emotional visual memory with help from the intellect. Color to me is the most mysterious means to work with. Delicate veils of graduated color add a mystical quality beyond the painted surface. These works successfully capture linear structures actively moving through a colored space. In 2010, at age 63, my work has achieved a harmonious degree of clarity and simplicity. I now desire to further my artistic ideas by producing paintings on a large scale.