MORE PAINTINGS

I’ve been busy trying to clear up a few loose ends. Here are a few pictures I’ve painted lately.

Music led me to some interesting places in the mid-70s. During my summers in high school I had a job mowing lawns, and whenever I got paid, I would rush over to the Princeton University Store and get a record and a copy of Rolling Stone Magazine. One day I came across a review of Lou Reed’s Rock’n’Roll Animal. After I bought that record, I chased down everything to do with Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. Reed had written a song about Delmore Schwartz, one of his college professors. I found Schwartz’s short story, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and I was blown away by its poignancy. If any story could convince me to become a writer, IDBR was probably the one.

Lou Reed once described his songwriting style as an effort to write rock and roll songs in the style of William Burroughs. That is probably a very poor description of what he said, but the idea behind made a lot of sense to me. So, here he is, the lunatic himself!