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Introduction

Now and then I’m asked, “What is it that inspires your painting, your creative life?” A reasonable, clearly defined answer would take far too much time and space, and as soon as I had finished I’m certain that I would turn around and face something astounding or something very quiet and small, that I had left out. Therefore I hope the following words will allow for the inclusion of the beauty, curiosity and wonder that surprises and inspires.

“Magnets, Rainbows and Funny Fish”

Magnets are mysterious. So mysterious that no one can explain how they do what they do. As such, they embody and symbolize the core of my spiritual life, the essence of my paradigm. The non-duality spoken of in Buddhism and Hinduism is best expressed in the magnet, which has a north pole and a south pole that are not two separate things but a single entity. Cut the magnet in half and you have two complete magnets, each with a north and South Pole. It’s not a difficult step, then, to see life and death as a single process, not two separate things. Likewise, Good and Evil, sound and silence.

Rainbows are a natural phenomenon of nature, bringing together three seemingly disparate components: a source of light, droplets of water in the air and an observer. Eliminate any one of the three and the rainbow disappears. What is most fascinating and inspiring is that the colors are not out there, or up there, or even over there. The various vibrations of light are interpreted as color, in our brain, in our consciousness, the most awe-inspiring phenomenon of all.

Funny Fish is my generic term for all of the weird, oddball flips of nature that delight me no end, like fish that fly through the air and birds that fly backwards and all sorts of bugs that glow in the dark, and flowers that bloom at night.

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1
Kentucky

     In 1927, as Charles Lindbergh was winging across the Atlantic Ocean, I was but two months old, barely aware of anything other than my mother's ample breasts. Then, becoming a boy of three, for unaccountably lost reasons, I left Milwaukee and went to live for three years with my great aunt and her husband in Louisville, Kentucky. Memories of those years are minuscule and of little consequence. Yet they come to mind now and then, all six of them: 1) I'm sitting on a caged counter passing out towels to basketball players on their way to the shower room: 2) At night on a busy street an old man with a monkey is playing a hurdy-gurdy: 3) We are in a sporting goods store, catapulting paper airplanes from the narrow balcony and: 4) Next door is a leather shop which I like very much because of the smell of the leather: 5) I'm helping someone shovel chunks of white lime from a quarry to make whitewash: 6) We are attending the Kentucky Derby.
      The time came when I could return to Milwaukee. It was 1933 and I was six. We drove all the way from Louisville and I remember, as we were leaving the city, seeing a flock of crows. I had the feeling that one of them was flying along with us, almost as if it were showing us the way. We drove on for hours. The passing scenery made me drowsy. Alone in the back seat I dozed off but as we were nearing the end of the journey I awoke and saw another crow and I imagined it to be the same bird that had shown us the way when we left. The first thing I told my mother after being apart so long was about the crow that had flown with us all the way from Louisville. Imagine meeting a brother, at this age, as if for the first time. I was but 15 months older than Jimmy.
      How could I know that the strange gray house I now encountered with its long staircase rising up to the second floor where we would live, would soon feel like home and that the strangeness would fade away? Gradually, it did come to feel like the center of a new life: there were now better things to remember, enthusiasms to fall asleep with, like skating on ice, trips to the country and more relatives with whom to stay. I had only a mother a younger brother, Jimmy, and one grandmother; no uncles, cousins, father, or grandfathers. This is not a lament. It's an observation, it's the way things were. I didn't feel as though I was missing anything.
      I discovered and savored the unused dark basement, made friends with the boy that lived downstairs, and explored the whole block. Soon I would be enrolled in my first Milwaukee school. There were things to do, places to go, vitality in the air.
      That big old gray house was the first place that my brother Jimmy and I would be living together with our mother. Because of Jimmy's weak health he was able to stay with our mother while I was periodically sent to spend school vacations with one relative or another, which, I realize now stimulated my curiosity. I never knew what to expect. I guess I adapted pretty well to different places.
      Our house was right on the corner. In the summer of 1934 the upstairs windows were open, with just enough traffic outside to keep the neighborhood from being called quiet. Sometimes, by previous arrangement, a nearby street would be taken over by carnival people setting up stalls along both sides of the street for the whole block. At a price, electricity would come from some of the houses along the street, lighting up the canopy of trees and reflecting off the hats, heads and shoulders of the milling crowd below. As word spread, their numbers grew. The kids dunked for apples. They shot corks out of small rifles. They threw baseballs at milk bottle pyramids, pushed and jostled each other with ice cream on their chins and cotton candy on their noses. The whole thing was an enterprise floating on pennies, nickels and dimes. The colorful stalls came down as quickly as they went up. After their three or four days the street relinquished all claim to the novelty and the scraps were quietly swept away.
      Into our upstairs windows came the sounds of night that on occasion might herald the call of “EXTRA!...EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!” over and over, special newspaper editions, uptown, downtown, cross-town. Once they had your attention with that you'd get the story line, “LOUIS KO'S SCHMELING, READ ALL ABOUT IT!!” Some of the long ago news is still vivid, the Hindenburg Zeppelin burning, the Lindbergh baby stories. And we were never spared the executions: So and so gets the electric chair.