I had decided not to go to college because what I wanted to do was paint a certain kind of painting that was not being taught in school at that time. They were teaching conceptual work and that was a very strong drive in the art schools when I was graduating high school. I enrolled in a couple of different colleges and ended up not in fact going after I saw the curriculum.
I ended up taking a very kind of lowly apartment in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I needed a job to live because my parents had moved out of the area. I ended up getting a job in a frame shop. In that frame shop they also did painting, conservation and things like that. I met my first mentor in the back room there. He was an abstract Neo-Dadaist. And boy, that wouldn’t have been my first choice for a teacher, but knowing him was a phenomenal experience.
His name is Ballory Barack. He’s still painting in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I learned so much about the materials and he had such a sense of craft. The strength of what I got from that relationship can’t actually be measured. I dedicated Zen Shorts to him.
My second teacher was a painter who did, for a long time, a lot of illustrations. His name was Jeffrey Jones. He and I began corresponding and we met a few times and then he was moving from the city to upstate New York and so he invited me to come and share a studio with him. So I made the move from Ohio then to New York.
He and I shared a studio for about a year. And that, like I say it was informal and as much as we were just painting in the same place, but I learned a great deal from being around him and seeing what it was like to actually be an artist functioning in the world. That’s where I got that information. I don’t think you can teach that in an art academy.