Flashback Friday! September 1985! Art Winner(s)!

 

In September of 1985 I was in my first ever group art exhibition in Woodstock, NY. By that time I was out of Art school for a year and three months. I'm not sure how I came to apply for the Woodstock School of Art's Third National Exhibition, most likely by seeing an ad for it in an issue of Woodstock Times picked up  during one of my many camping trips up to Overlook Mountain that summer.  At that point,  I was still working for the poet James Schuyler at the Chelsea Hotel,  involved in editing/printing my poetry magazine Blue Smoke and was still very much involved with the St. Marks Poetry Project in The East Village, NYC.  It was a great moment of accomplishment to be chosen for the show. The Woodstock School of Art has a long established reputation in the Catskill Mountains and has always hosted a respectable faculty.

This drawing was executed about a year earlier in 1984. After graduating SVA in June 1984 I was lucky enough to not have to worry about money and was able to spend my summer drawing and taking my portfolio around NYC (which gave me ample time to hang out in the city nurturing my creativity - I spent hours in Gotham Book Mart at 41 West 47th St. and in the galleries of 57th Street). Even though I had just been in art school for four years, I feel I really learned how to draw that summer. I constantly sketched, shot reference with my camera, scoured second hand bookstores for old photo picture books to work from. I'd sometimes spend 8 - 10 hours in my room, at the end of my bed, a piece of 23" X 29" Strathmore drawing paper taped to my wall,  with a dull pencil, stick of graphite and eraser tackling form and content. When I wasn't doing that I worked in large, hard cover, oblong sketchbooks - one of which I gave to a friend who saved my ass when I had no money, no job and no prospects ten years later. I was committed to drawing. This drawing came about as the result of studying a photo of a sports field . It was also inspired by the writer Clark Coolidge.  The title Wheat of Sight is from a work of his. He had sent me a bundle of poems for Blue Smoke and it was from one of those works I got the title from. In a mutual relationship,  Clark's work was also an inspiration to the painter Philip Guston, so there was already a visual component I was tuning into.  The X's were from a piece of denim I stitched together, inspired by an illustration for a review of Neil Young's Trans that I saw in Rolling Stone around the same time. It seems like all my drawings that summer were a breakthrough. But I always saw this one as the turning point.

That September was the defining time for me as a young artist.  It kicked off with this show, winning an award for Outstanding Artistic Merit ($200.00 in fact). Two weeks later I got this copy of  Woodstock Times in the mail and was overjoyed to see my work recognized, news worthy. Both the exhibition and the award would provide much needed impetus for me to continue on my path. It inspired a sense of future promise  (little did I know that two years later I'd spend four summers working for Mrs. Milton Avery just outside Woodstock in Bearsville, NY). Later that month, I'd leave my position with Jimmy Schuyler, ditch The Poetry Project and get my first (and only) illustration job. The following year Wheat of Sight would win a first place (cash) award in the Drawing category in a juried exhibition at The Bergen Museum of Art and Science in Paramus, NJ.  It is with me to this day and it is NFS.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday! 40 Years Ago! High Times December 1985!

Forty years ago I had the honor of having one of my drawings used in High Times magazine.  I've written about this before (see link below).  It was featured in Cookie Mueller's High Advisor Column illustrating a story on twins.  My reference was poet Phil Good resting in a room at 21 East 2nd Street, behind the legendary club CBGB. It was, without doubt, the most unusually fun "interview" I ever had in my life. Located on West 60th Street, off Columbus Circle, High Times was something to behold abounding with Fort Knox style security. I was given a code at what passed for a reception area and buzzed into a long space-age hallway reeking of powerful marijuana, out of the corner of my eye I caught table heaped almost a foot high with gold and green marijuana buds being obliterated by a photographer's bright flash. At the end of the hall stood the rather diminutive Santiago Cohen and his Art Director Mark Michaelson (who'd go on to work for John Giorno's AIDS Treatment Project). They welcomed me into a cluttered studio redolent of high grade pot, there was a bottle of Pepe Lopez Tequila with slices of lemon  and salt on a layout table. They felt like old friends and in no time at all they began going through my portfolio with interest while passing me an enormous joint, handing me the bottle of tequila. After a year and a half of being rejected by every magazine, newspaper and book publisher in NYC, I finally found these two guys who "got me."  We sat around casually shooting the shit (it was a Friday afternoon) as they gave me my assignment. The rest is history. However, once outside, I was barely able to navigate my surroundings so I could get myself back to the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

The illustration on the right is from the magazine I purchased at The OM - Rockland County's first and foremost head shop, in December of 1985. I proudly displayed my page to anyone within earshot or working there that day. The Om was the place, the proverbial "it" when it came to headgear, hip silver jewellery or cool clothes.  It was the very first headshop in the area going as far back as 1969 - when they'd finally close, around 1990, I was able to claim the camel bells that hung on the door for two decades as my own. They reside on the door to my shrine room to this day.  The other copy (in glassine wrap) was obtained in October 2022 at  Country Bumpkin Antiques in White Lake, NY.  My partner Cliff and I , through the years of leaf peeping and visiting the Woodstock Festival grounds in Bethel, would always stop at the Country Bumpkin forming a warm friendship with the owner and her mother. We always left with some great treasure - a black glass inkwell, A Betty Crocker Cookbook from the early seventies, a pizza cutter, a Corningware tea kettle. Sadly, we knew this would be our last trip to the 'Bumpkin as we affectionately called it. We were already downsizing, anticipating the sale of our home and our imminent move. At the top of a crooked staircase was a display of ephemera, including back issues of High Times - which I excitedly leafed through. Ta! Da! There it was - High Times December 1985. All wrapped up n' ready to go. I must have been beaming as I took the issue out, displaying my illustration on page 14 to our friends, who refused my money and gave it to me as a gift. We'd visit the 'Bumpkin no more. You know you've achieved something when you find your artwork in an antique store thirty seven years after the fact!

***

More High Times from September 1985:

http://www.billdenoyelles.com/2016/08/high-times-december-1985-this-is-only.html

 

 It'll be awhile before I see this again...

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday

I had my first one man show at Te-Ma Gallery on Mill Hill Road in Woodstock, NY in late 1988. Te-Ma was an artful furniture and accessory shop shepherded by a lovely, statuesque German woman named Dorothy Telson.  I walked in one day and said "Hey, my art would look great in here!" She was up for it so I brought down some work from my studio in Bearsville where I was working for Sally Avery summers 1987 through 1990. Dorothy loved my work, it was a go.  The show turned out to be fruitful for us both. At the time I painted geometric color fields along with large drawings like the one in the article, which I sold. Far from what I would end up doing and certainly far from where I am now....  More of a photographer than anything else.

My opening was Thanksgiving weekend... Saturday November 26, 1988. It was attended by the entire Avery family, friends from in and around Woodstock, my family and my closest friends from SVA. After the opening we had a casual dinner at The Woodstock Pub, afterwards my friends took me down to Dover, NJ to see Pinetop Perkins at The Show Place -  a long drive from Woodstock, NY.  The celebration went on to daybreak the next day.

Dorothy extended my show through the winter of 1989 and I sold a few pieces. This article was written by  local personality/art critic Dakota Lane. She even interviewed me over the phone at the art gallery I worked at in Fairlawn, NJ.  It seems like ancient times now yet my memories of that night are crystal clear - full of the bright palette of my paintings, the cold mountain air, the love of my friends n' family. 

 

Happy Thanksgiving

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday. 10.08.2023

 

 

 

Veteran' Day

 

My father owned only two Johnny Cash Albums - Show Time on Sun Records and Johnny Cash's Greatest Hits Volume 1 on Columbia. He played them often. But especially when he was cleaning or polishing the furniture. Once, when it was just the two of us ( I was either nine of ten years old), he was playing the Columbia compilation and took pause from his chores to listen intently to The Ballad of Ira Hayes - it was almost as if he knew this Ira Hayes. I listened along but really, at age 9/10,  lot of it was beyond me... so I asked him about it. He got thoughtful for a minute and then told me, as simply as possible, who Ira Hayes was. Ira Hayes was an American Indian who served his country & helped raise the American Flag at Iwo Jima February 23, 1945. He was born a Pima Indian in Arizona and was raised, in poverty, on a reservation and enlisted in The Marine Corp in (August 1942). He not only helped raise the flag that day but he also helped identify the others who  were alongside him. As a post war civilian Ira suffered from what we now call PTSD (though no one knew about this until the late eighties) and alcoholism. This hero became a destitute alcoholic who would eventually die of exposure and alcohol poisoning in a ditch on January 23, 1955. (On November 10, 1954 he attended the dedication of the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington County, Virginia, which was modeled after the photograph of Hayes and five other Marines raising the second flag on Iwo Jima.) My father had his own post war demons that he battled right on up until his death in May 1983. Known on his jobs as "The Whistler" my father, throughout his life, whistled the Ballad of Ira Hayes ( written by NYC Folk musician Peter LeFarge).

Our Veterans sacrificed everything for our freedom while experiencing the unthinkable. And more often than not, they have suffered in great silence. Around late 1969 my brother's best friend Alan Vogel returned from Vietnam missing the lower part of his left leg and was partially blind in his left eye sporting an intense facial scar. I remember how hard and sad it was to see him when he arrived home to Pearl River, NY. I also remember how much time my father spent with him over cans of Schlitz Beer in our kitchen whenever he came over. And I remember my father doing his very best to explain it to me. When Vietnam Veterans came home they were literally spit upon by Leftists - who, as we see now, are always on the wrong side of everything. Many experience drug addiction, crippling depression, (PTSD) . Too many are still homeless and suffering. Pathetic, since we owe them everything. Thank a Veteran whenever you can, I do. And do what you can.

Wounded Warrior Project 

Tunnel to Towers Foundation

Disabled American Veterans

The Virtual Vietnam Veterans Wall

 

 

 

 

 

 

...wait for it...

 

 

 

 

Happy Halloween

 

Back in the late seventies & early eighties WNET Channel 13 NY used to show Nosferatu on Halloween. A classic horror film from 1922 starring Max Schreck. Directed by F.W. Murnau,  it is a silent German Expressionist film that, to this day, remains one of the scariest things you'll ever see. I was wholly disappointed in the latest remake...so under-exposed you could barely see details, though it had its charm - namely the landscapes. In 1977 Blue Oyster Cult released this song on their Spectres album, with lyrics by artist/poet Helen Wheels (Helen Robins).  I've always enjoyed it.