Still More Old Art

This one's REALLY old. It's the very first one I did in this style or format or whatever you'd call it. Everything else I've done since then, I consider to be an evolved form of this.

When I first started grad school at UCLA as a painting major, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I pretty much wasted most of the first year, trying this and that different way of painting but sticking with nothing, in the search for my "true style". It was a dismal and panic-filled time.

I was near the end of my wits when, very fortunately, I found a studio space to share -- with one of my professors.

As her portion of the space was adjacent to mine, she got to see the little odds and ends that kept appearing on my work table -- small found objects and bits of debris that I found interesting and brought in, or simply never bothered to throw out. Some I would absently modify in some way, literally doodling in 3-D.

And finally, she made a suggestion one day that changed the course of my art forever. She remarked, perhaps seriously, perhaps partly in jest, that she actually found those trivial objects more interesting than my 'official' work -- and since I obviously found them congenial -- why not use them in my paintings somehow?

I took to it like a duck to water. It feels so natural to me now that it's rather surprising that I had to be prompted by someone else; I think what I lacked was the validation that an explicit suggestion from an authoritative source represented. In fact, in hindsight it's clear that I had already taken some tentative steps in this direction -- even as an undergrad at USC I remember another one of my professors observing that I was always drawing things in boxes (not in the literal sense of actually drawing boxes, as in still-lifes, but in the sense of placing the various visual elements in their own separate compartments on the drawing surface; which reminds me, this is a thematic treatment that is very common in art produced by schizophrenics -- I guess I was already well on my way^).  From 2-D boxes it was a simple dimensional leap to 3-D ones, but first I needed to be freed from: #1. the grip of certain fundamental presumptions about what a "painting" was; and #2. the idea that I was a painter, not a sculptor, that painting was painting and sculpture was sculpture and *never the twain shall meet. Thank you, Anne Marie Karlsen -- for finding a way for me to cross that mental gulf in a surreptitious, non-traumatic way.

Anyway, this is the very first piece I did, explicitly following Prof. Karlsen's suggestion. It incorporates a vertebra (actually two vertebrae, but one fell off -- you can see clearly where it used to be, at the top), as well as plant parts painted in "faux-trompe-l'oeil", and uses a much freer visual language than before.  At my graduation orals I was so, so gratified to have **one of the professors on my graduate committee comment that, of all the students he could remember, I was the one who had made the greatest improvement in the shortest period.  All because I  had stopped thinking of myself as "a painter only".

*Ironically enough, my very first sale was a sculpture, not a painting.  And yes, it incorporated a found object as the main point of interest.

**Elliot Elgart, as I remember.

EDIT:  I have since replaced the missing vertebra with a heart, as acknowledged in this post: