Some people wake up excited about the challenges that lie ahead of them each day, I am told.   Opening their eyes on another day of infinite possibility they use their precious time wisely and keep their eye on the bottom line.  This line can be measured in money coming in, return on investment.  If they have an online business they are launching, the metrics for success are at their fingertips and can be quickly taken in with the morning coffee and a healthy breakfast, after an hour at cardio and a hot shower.  They remain focused and undistracted while they work, and then they play hard.

I have some of that single-minded entrepreneurial spirit, and always have.   This may not be the best example of it, but about 30 years ago I still had dreams of being Picasso.  That these dreams were largely my grandmother’s had not started bothering me yet.  Back then I thought it only a matter of time before I could draw on the linen table cloth of a fancy restaurant by way of treating a table full of my friends to a sumptuous meal.   The owner and chef would beam from ear to ear as I did this, the staff also looking on, elbowing each other playfully as I drew.

After buying some art supplies from Pearl Paint, still packaged back then in rough brown paper bags, I walked up through SoHo where an image outside a gallery caught my eye.  I went in and saw an exhibit of the art of a persecuted Laotian mountain people called the H’mong.  Some H’mong, a small South Chinese ethnic group, had long ago settled in Laos where they became valuable and loyal allies of the United States in our secret war against Communism in Laos, a neighbor of Viet Nam.  When the U.S. withdrew from Viet Nam the Pathet Lao had a bloody score to settle with the H’mong, many of whom were killed, thousands herded into “re-education” camps in Laos and thousands more fleeing to squalid refugee camps in Thailand.   Most of my family had disappeared under similar ruthless circumstances in muddy Eastern Europe in the freezing winter of 1942, so there was a personal connection, and a visceral one.

There was one image in particular that stopped me in my tracks, transfixed me.  A H’mong boy, naked and skeletal, lying on his side, regarded the camera with the stoic expression of one who had never known hope.  The light in the photograph was stunning, the doomed boy was rendered like a sculpture.   Photograph means “drawing with light” and that’s what this was, a three dimensional space rendered palpably on a flat surface.  

Without taking my eyes off it I quickly drew the boy in black ink on the brown bag.   The drawing was only a few pen strokes, but it caught the pose and the boy and a thick stab of ink made a convincingly deep shadow under his pitiful body.   I took a small dab of white gouache out of the tube and smeared the light over the boy’s skull, rib cage and legs.  The image jumped off the bag.  I later made a two color silkscreen of it, with my name brushed Picasso-like beneath it, along with the date, some time in 1980 or 81.  

At the time I thought, somehow, that this was a huge step in my evolution as an artist, the ability to react vividly and instantly to a visceral experience.  One friend I showed the silkscreen to, a plainspoken young man decades from his terrible uphill fight with a rare and particularly vicious form of cancer, said “what’s with you and the dead guy?”   I couldn’t explain it then.  It seemed to me it required something like the hip Louis Armstrong’s answer to the square who asked him what jazz was.  “If you’ve got to ask, Daddy, you ain’t never gonna know.”