On Being Original

The myth that originality means creating from nothing is misleading.

Last Night's Drunk 78"x62" oil on canvas, 1984, Old Jail Art Center, Albany, TX

As a young artist I studied Picasso’s works in the Zervos catalogue raisonné. I studied Goya, those black paintings, the disasters of war, the grotesque visions. I absorbed them. I studied Francis Bacon’s paintings in detail. Read David Sylvester’s “Interviews With Francis Bacon: The Brutality of Fact”, one of the most important documents about art and painting. When I was peddling jewelry outside the Met and MoMA, I also went inside those institutions to look at Soutine, Kandinsky, Klee, Dubuffet, Schiele, the old masters, everything, too many to list!

Woman, 46”X38” oil on linen, 1983

John Caldwell, who curated my show at Carnegie Mellon and acquired one of my paintings for the Carnegie Institute’s permanent collection, wrote about the connections between my work and Caravaggio—that dramatic use of light emerging from darkness, the spiritual intensity, the way violence and transcendence occupy the same space. Sam Hunter, the art historian who was Professor Emeritus at Princeton, saw in my work reminiscences of Bacon, Soutine, and Goya’s black paintings, and connections to Chagall, Schiele, Dix, and Beckmann.

Hold On, 85"x76" acrylic on canvas, 1983, Carnegie Museum of Art, PA

So yes, I was influenced, by Goya’s nightmares, Picasso’s revolutions, Bacon’s twisted figures, Caravaggio’s drama, Klee’s elegance, they’re all there. Being original is digesting influences so completely that when they come back out through your work, they’re transformed. Derivation isn’t the opposite of originality, it’s the foundation of it. We’re all standing on shoulders. The question isn’t whether you’re influenced. The question is whether you have the ability to transform those influences into something that could only come from your particular psyche, your particular history.

Travel, 78”X62” oil on linen, in private collection

I wasn’t following trends. I was following where painting took me, using everything I’d learned and seen, but trusting my own visions above all else. For over five decades I’ve painted from my dreams, my inner psyche. My work is in MoMA, the Met, the Carnegie Institute, museums around the world. And yes, I’m called an original artist. But that originality didn’t come from isolation or ignorance of what came before. It came from a deep dive into art history and then having a strong inner voice that all those influences got metabolized into something unmistakably mine. You can see where I’ve been, who I’ve looked at, what moved me. But you can’t mistake my work for anyone else’s.

That’s what originality actually is. Not purity. Alchemy.