I did not study Art, I’d decided that I wanted to be an artist at 13 after watching with my mother in the early morning her tele-class on art history it was the story of the Malevich room with the black square in the corner where in the Russian house the cross would be I remember he said that God had forgotten Russia so he was forgetting God. I remembered the Russian avant-garde but not his name. Growing up in Burbank California, in the shadow of the studios, I had always wanted to make the kind of b-horror movies we saw at the local theater and late night TV. The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Hell House and The Fall of the House of Usher.
I began taking pictures of bleak Burbank and Hollywood early 80’s industrial dilapidation. There was something about the dichotomy of the image of Hollywood and it’s bleak reality that appealed to me. Being a shy kid I had a hard time organizing shoots for my movie ideas. I wanted to do some kind of creative practice that didn't require money at each step ( film, development, printing) so the idea of painting appealed to me. By 1980 I began painting with house paint and whatever on pieces of wood as an outgrowth of my highschool days decorating skateboards then, larger, skimboards. After that, whatever surface could be scrounged from my neighborhood and the Lockheed adjacent dumpsters in my town. Eventually,I moved to Hollywood, then I took a loft in downtown LA where I was influenced by the older artists that lived in the Traction Triangle area.
