To my mind, this is another Buddhist image, since the shape of his head is reminiscent of the top knot traditional monks wore their hair in. Titled Stupa, a term used to for architecture that also reflects back to this top knot, I did this painting after seeing a sculpture exhibition at the Asia Society by an artist named Montien Boonma who had dedicated the work to his wife who'd died, and then he passed away as well before the show. Mostly installations, what looked to be a million mantra beads strung and hung to create a temple, and much of the many clay pieces had flower petals mixed in so they had a glorious smell. The most powerful, for me, were a series of enormous heads, all wearing the top knot, that one could walk inside of; they were hung at a height that let light in through the eye sockets that the viewer could not see out of. I stood inside one and cried, then went back after seeing the rest of the exhibition and stood inside it and cried again. Because I had to.

For the record, I'm now a Buddhist, although my practice is laxer than it once was. After all that church-going as an adolescent, I discovered my fundamental belief in reincarnation and what I now know as karma are actually the philosophical foundation of a real religion. There are many of ways to be Buddhist, which part of its beauty; I once heard a Rinpoche, when asked what was the best practice, say that if you find enlightenment sweeping the street, then by all means, sweep the street. 

Ever seen those scary Tibetan demon masks? Their purpose is to protect you by terrifying your enemies. Here's one of my more alarming angels, Avatar, and he does that for me.

Next came Lonesome Traveler, fully transitioned, just the angel with no egg shapes in the negative space, and a repeat of the image with the original howling face. I would use him again on several occasions, as he is one of my favorites, and dedicated this one to my friend Dennis. It was the first to officially be about AIDS.

This second angel, still evolving and titled Dharma Bum for our dearly loved Jack Kerouac, was the first to take on legs. The shapes around and inside him are based on, of all things, a display of dinosaur eggs I saw at the Natural History Museum. I found that nest moving, and used it consistently for my abstract work in the period preceding the angels. 

Here is the transition from abstract to angel. The gouache study on black paper, there are dozens of these although this is the last of the series, was done in preparation for the painting below. In between, I attended a Solstice sunrise Native American drumming ceremony in the courtyard between the two World Trade Center towers. I had just lost yet another friend to AIDS and found the ceremony quite moving. Later, listening to a tape of the drummers as I began the new egg tempera panel, I noticed a howling face in it. This was my first Archetypal Angel, and I intended to do one for every friend I lost to the virus.

New York was a scary place in the 70s, parts of it were always on fire, nobody had any money. I was here to work on a friend's film, which never got finished, and got sucked into the Bad Girl of Soho vortex. I continued to make art, no Angels or Indians, mostly freelance gigs, backdrops for boutique windows and theater flats, but I didn't fulfill my promising potential, I was too busy trying to have a life. I drew a lot of cloud formations from the roof though, and these lead to the abstracts I painted in the 80s. Here is one of those. Interestingly enough, not only is it a square, and a similar palette to the previous post, I see the hint of an angel in it.

I went to the Ozarks for graduate school, but dropped out after a few weeks and worked at a health food restaurant instead. Serving rice and beans to Southern hippies who all looked like the Allman Brothers, I moved into a commune for a brief but excruciating entanglement with one of the men and then escaped to a tiny cabin in the woods. Forever finding arrowheads, I designed art, all Native American in theme, for the local hippie establishments. Using my cabin as a base, I spent the next two years traveling. I hitchhiked to Mardi Gras a couple times, and was back and forth to New York twice with a long stay in Virginia to make money as a nude model at my alma mater before finally settling down in Soho on my third trip, and then promptly cut off all my hair.

Recently I reunited virtually with a dozen or so college friends, some who I haven't seen since the early 70's. Fun at first, until memories of those who have died and foolish heartbreaks rose up, I still found confronting my past interesting. Angels made a strong if brief return after I spent my Sophomore summer in Europe, where my parents were stationed in Germany again. All those churches, and the success of Jesus Christ Superstar, gave me a reason to put wings on the beautiful faces I'd been creating. I got a lot of flack from friends as well as instructors; they didn't get it. We'd survived three assassinations and were in the middle of a brutal war, and here I was making pretty religious icons.

Then, 7 weeks into my Senior year, my mother committed suicide and I coasted through the rest of that semester. By spring, I was doing a new kind of angel, abstracted into geometric shapes that could have been anything, but I knew what they were. On the strength of that and my intended thesis about Angels as Archetypal images, I got into graduate school. I would go on to drop out, but that's another story.

 This is Sparky, a recent, and my most favorite, of the papier mache sculptures I have been doing. Clearly an angel, I believe he's singing; although he could be heralding an important announcement. Which is what angels do, along with being guardians as well as witnesses to the dramas we humans find ourselves in.

As an intern at the Smithsonian, my primary job was hospitality. I ran the front desk and walked the exhibits several times a day to refill the pamphlets and flyers. On quiet days, I borrowed books from the research library and copied images of tribal art into my sketchbook. I particularly liked the work from the Northwest Coast tribes, those alleged cannibals. Funny, later I filled the last few pages with drawings I did looking at Basquiat, and only I can tell the different influences. 

But my favorite thing were the craft classes; it would be me and a bunch of kids playing around, and I was always the most excited. This angel was done during the cornhusk doll lesson, it's three times bigger than the traditional clothes pin size and I would have made it a friend but I didn't want to be greedy. Very fragile, especially the wings, it changed my take on the sculpture I'd been doing, which had been more about the painted surface than the solid form.

Two more masks, while we're at it, titled Crazy Horse and Feather for obvious reasons, and totally tribal. These were done during my internship at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian as part of the program I attended at Pace University for professionals who had been displaced by 9/11.

A whole other story, another time perhaps, in fact I'm sure we will get there eventually, to that catastrophe, but just not today. I want to stay with the art, I always want to stay with the art, and as sad as these two guys are, they make me happy. 

And by the way, those are parrot feathers from my little friend Pacino, a Senegal, who won't say Hoohah for anything.

I was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Geronimo spent the end of his life locked up with the rest of his tribe. In transit, my parents were only there long enough for my mother to have me and then went on their way again. Believing in reincarnation, I think I must have picked up one of those Apache souls because, although the only way I could be more Irish is if I lived in Ireland, I've always felt a powerful First Nation connection. Sometimes my Angels, especially the masks, speak rather loudly to this influence.

In high school, still in Virginia, I showed all the promise of becoming a successful artist, winning awards at little shows and even exhibiting my work at a gallery in Alexandria. No angels though, mostly musicians, Mick Jagger, imagine, if you know me today, you'd get the joke since I no longer, what, care for him. Interestingly enough, I was painting on masonite panels that I cut and braced myself; this is now again my chosen format, except these days I buy my panels already mounted and primed with gesso. The lazy way out, unless I'm in a working-on-paper mode; then things can get complicated and messy, which I always find really appealing.

As a young teenager I focused my artistic energy on experimenting with new mediums. I drove one teacher crazy for a couple of weeks while I tossed powdered tempera on black construction paper I had primed with watered down library paste. Very Jackson Pollack. He was so alarmed by the mess the first time I tried it, he brought a big cardboard box for me to do it in. And then I found out about Robert Rauschenberg.

I officially stopped going to church in Virginia where my local choices were strict Methodist or scary Pentecostal. After several years in Germany with its gloomy Romanesque and awe-filled Gothic architecture, there were nine or ten months in Kansas where I continued to attend the generic Christian services on base before we moved to a civilian suburb outside of DC. Into Bible study and singing carols in the school choir, I was part of a crew who painted the Nativity scene on sheer glassine paper for our fake stain glass window backdrops at the Christmas recital. I liked doing it so much, I painted an angel for our living room window. My mother, proud of my work, put it up, much to my father's chagrin. Embarrassed by the subject matter, he asked her, in front of me, why I hadn't done a Santa Claus instead.

The earliest existing piece of my artwork is a mug I made during a Christmas visit with my paternal grandmother, who was a professional ceramist. It has a sloppy blue handle and seven equally messy angels dancing around the badly cracked bowl with my name in her elegant scrolling handwriting. I was maybe five, and stood at her craft table with an apron tied around my neck. It now sits on my desk with pens and scissors in it as the cracks leak too much to drink out of it. 

My parents, a mix of Irish-American Catholic and Protestant families, were not big on church. I found myself as an adolescent going alone to the generic Christian service at the Army base we lived on. Angels were really important to me, I did complicated drawings of them with friendly faces and glorious halos and wings. Eventually, I moved on to teenager things - cigarettes, big hairdos, the Beatles.