Part I:
I consider myself fortunate to have been born into an artist’s household. Growing up, the door to my father’s studio was eleven steps from my bedroom. Art tools and the magic of making beautiful things was embedded into my upbringing from the beginning. Both my parents were teachers: my mother taught first grade in the Ann Arbor public school system, my father was a professor in the School of Art at the University of Michigan. In our house, art was everywhere—on every wall. 3-D art objects occupied every available flat surface. Conversations frequently dwelt on the designs of the Eames, Saarinen, Bertoia, and George Nelson. My father’s colleagues and professor friends from different academic disciplines visited us frequently. Dinner table talk centered on art and artists—who was admired, and who was not. As I recall, no one at the table failed to have a strong opinion about things.
The primacy of the made object was evident from the time I was able to form a thought. Art was the context of daily life and served as the springboard for imagination. Later on, this upbringing made choosing art as a career easy. In school, many of my college professors were former students of my father and were eager to share their own fresh and divergent perspectives. The university, particularly the art building, felt like home to me. In college, two collateral interests, philosophy and literature dovetailed happily into conversations about the intellectualism in art of the 60s and 70s. The writings of artists like Robert Motherwell, Frank Stella, and Clifford Still framed my ideas about painting, as well as a philosophy of making. Detroit, Ann Arbor, and environs were hotbeds of artistic activity in the Midwest. Everyone knew everyone back then.
Much of my fiction centers around art and artists because that’s the world I live in. One thing that most artists know is that, like life, art doesn’t always end well. It’s the struggle that interests me—regardless of eventual failure or success. Struggle with the self, the art gods, the distant promise of immortality. It may be that the days of heroic western art have ended. Perhaps permanently. There are lots of reasons this conclusion may be true, but we also know that artists and epochs come and go. Art thrives on a fertile dialectic between the old and new. One fortunate thing about visual art is the past is always present in galleries, museums, books, and artist studios. For me, that’s a world worth writing about.