10 Autobiographical Sketches



I don't know why - one never really knows why - but in 1976, while artist-in-residence at Mount Holyoke college in Massachusetts, I began a series of paintings based on transpositions of my profile. No, it wasn't narcissistic, but purely formalistic. There is nothing really autobiographical about the "sketches", except for my silhouette. I might as well have used squares, circles and cubes. Come to think of it, some of the prints are autobiographical. For example, the dinosaur skeleton isn't there simply because I "borrowed" it from my son Garry. It is there because when I was little my big ambition was to be a paleontologist. Garry wasn't amused, by the way, that I had ruined one of his favorite playthings. Bur perhaps my theft was really a GOOD THING. Just suppose he had grown up to be a paleontologist: He wouldn't be directing his own theater or singing the lead role in Cosi fan tutti!