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.