My mother and my father were arty lefty Jews. They had no interest in religion, business, academic credentials, or taxes. They cared about music, film, painting, literature, dance, and theater. To be an artist was the highest calling.
I never wanted to be an ARTIST
We were four kids, and all three of my siblings—Annie, Avery and Reuben—grew up to be professional musicians with amazingly successful and creative careers.
Me? I had a different idea. I wasn’t going to buckle down to my parents authoritarian artist-loving wishes. Artists are just a bunch of spoiled, coddled narcissists! I was going to be the blue collar working class hero. Before I even graduated high school, I was seeking romantic blue-collar jobs like forest ranger, blacksmith, mason, farmer. At the age of 17, I moved up to Rockbottom Farm in Strafford Vermont, which was a cross between a hippie commune and a pre-industrial farm where I drove a team or horses, maple-sugared, strung barbed wire fences, milked cows, tended to and butchered animals.
Me, Bonny and Red (the Percheron draft horses) and a kid a whose name I can’t remember
My mother cried. My Jewish son a farmer!
After the farm I worked as a carpenter and eventually bought dilapidated homes in Philadelphia, renovated and sold them. I was 26 years old and I could see a glorious blue color entrepreneurial future before me. And I was completely panicked. My mother was right. I shoulda been an artist.
Because I still felt a lingering disdain for artists I started with a gateway artistic career. Cartoonist! That’s not too pretentious is it? Somehow, from doing cartoons for a newspaper in Berkeley California the editor in chief offered me the job of managing editor. One of my responsibilities was to lay out the typography for the newspaper. I was like, “Fonts are kind of cool and not too pretentious, right? Maybe I’ll look for a job as an Art Director.” I became the Art Director for The San Francisco Bay Guardian and later the Art Director for the Sunday magazine of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
I moved down to NYC to become the Art Director of New York Magazine. I was hiring super cool illustrators and going to art shows in the exploding East Village art scene and I was like, “These artists aren’t coddled weaklings. They’re actually pretty cool and doing a lot of really cool things so why the hell not me? Right mom?” I finally got over my artist disdain. And I went on to become an illustrator, painter, fine artist, filmmaker, window designer, digital artist and a whole bunch of other arty things.
