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FoRewoRd I grew up in the Monongahela Valley cities of McKeesport and Clairton at a time that now seems as remote to me as that of the great pyramids of Egypt. Rushing home from elementary school to listen to the fifteen-minute radio programs called serials, like Terry and the Pirates and Jack Armstrong. Gritty, shiny specks of stuff from the steel mills on the snowy streets. Always drawing, I liked to sit up in bed listening to the Friday night fights and draw, trying to get the feeling of the radio announcer ’s action. Once I spilled a bottle of black drawing ink on the white sheets and felt proud that I got most of it out with, I think, a mixture of salt and lemon juice, something that I read about in a junior chemistry set book. In seventh grade I was a popular drawer of naked women. None of us, including me, had ever actually seen a naked woman, but I must have seen a painting or a drawing of one, perhaps on a wall somewhere. Keeping these drawings, passed around in class, from being noticed and intercepted by the Catholic nun teacher was an exercise in daring; the result of discovery would have been awful. It became understood that I would be an artist in some fashion , first by my mother, who was my best influence, and then by my high school art teacher, who complained that I never did what she wanted me to do but who nonetheless encouraged me to go to Carnegie Tech, where she had been a student. Carnegie Tech was the only school I applied to, and somewhat to my surprise I was accepted, beginning my freshman year in the department of painting and design in the fall of 1951. So my new life began as a seventeen-year-old freshman art student. I am seventy-eight years old as I write this, having been for the sixty-one years in between a teacher, a husband and father, now a grandfather, and in temporary duties in the U.S. Army and the U.S. Postal Service, but always drawing and painting. Visual art is the one constant in ix my life. Why? It’s what I do best, what always had given, and still does give, lasting satisfaction. “Expression is the need of my soul,” said Archy the cockroach. Me too. In the summer of 1956 I went to San Francisco, intending to work for the summer and return to Carnegie Tech and finish my senior year. I had been in the army from 1953 to 1955; many of the cool people I met there were from California and West Coast jazz was new. But instead of returning to Pittsburgh as I had planned, I stayed for three years. By a series of happy accidents, I became a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts, landing in the middle of a new art movement, which came to be known as the Bay Area Figurative movement. I was invited as a student to be in the first museum exhibition of this painting style at the Oakland Museum of Art in 1957. My teacher and mentor was Richard Diebenkorn, now regarded as a modern American master. Those three years in California were the most important ones in my artistic life. The most important time, life changing for me, was the six years in upstate New York teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego. It was the start of my teaching career, leading to an MFA at Syracuse University. (I had finished my undergraduate BFA at California College of Arts and Crafts.) And not least of all, I got married and started a family. At the time of her death in 2010, my wife Joanne and I had been married for forty-six years. Throughout my travels, England in the army, California, and upstate New York, I kept the feeling that Pittsburgh was my place. When I had the opportunity to return in 1968, I did and have lived here since then, working , expanding my visual range, exhibiting frequently. Much of this history is described in the first chapter of this book. Dr. Clark uses a recent large painting, A Life, as both an example of my working process and life story. Stories, fictions, imaginative re-creations, my own or stolen from much better writers , have been in my work forever, often in earlier paintings, written in the margins...

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