Flashback Friday ! From The SVA Journals (1980-1984)

At the end of my fourth year in the Illustration Department at SVA in 1984, graduating students were encouraged to submit up to four works for SVA's Illustration Portfolio catalog to be judged by prominent Art Directors from NYC's publishing domain. I was ecstatic to have one of my works chosen. Not that this did a thing for me in the way of obtaining much needed work. Far from it. But to me it was still an honor!

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From The SVA Journals (1980 -1984)  (For Ann Rower)

...Those strange SVA 209 East 23rd Street stairways that went to some oblique location, between floors really, not first to second or second to third but somewhere in between, like a bardo. These were non destinations hidden away, off the beaten path used for lockers and offices. One thing about SVA, nothing was ever wasted except, perhaps, the students. That’s where the Bursar's office was. Up one of those bizarre stair wells. It was faithfully watched over by an award winning SVA designed poster of Paul Gauguin as a banker behind bars. I felt like I was behind bars myself most of the time! And it was here I’d have to go regularly to make small incremental payments against the larger sum of a semester’s tuition to the Bursar himself - a heavy set, kind Latino man who was also completely professional and serious. I always felt like I was begging for my life. He’d gently, but firmly, explain to me that my debt was quite large and I’d soon, no doubt, have to drop out.

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From the time I started SVA in September 1980 my father’s health began to decline. He made it his own private matter but no doubt something was wrong. He began taking sick days from work (which he never did, in fact I can’t remember him ever being sick a day in his life up to then, let alone missing work). He seemed ill with one malady or another more often than not. Tensions grew in the house between all three of us, once in great pain he even blamed my desire to be an artist as a cause for his being sick. I worked as hard as I could during my four years at SVA which ran parallel to my father’s worsening health, which also made it almost impossible to continue alongside the money issues I was having yet somehow I got through. I was under a tremendous amount of stress and my memory of these days is as though they were all experienced in a perpetual state of dusk in winter. I can’t remember an experience of daylight save for a day in February 1983 when I met poets Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh (then husband & wife) at a workshop held in Ann Rower's class called Making a Living as a Poet in New York City.  I had brought stacks of their books for them to sign, we hit it off as kindred spirits and engaged in lively conversation. As we walked out onto 2nd. Ave/22nd Street to continue talking, NYC seemed glaringly bright, white with sun on snow embankments and snow melting on wet streets from the blizzard of the past weekend. Bernadette headed down Second Ave., Lewis cross town to 23rd/8th Avenue, where his parents lived. My father died three months later.

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