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.