Artist Statement? Artist Bio? Attempt number one

Here's one for the archives

I grew up in Corinth NY, a small town in the southern Adirondack Mountains. Started drawing as soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil, and experimented with painting and photography throughout high school.

After high school I left Corinth and headed to the Northern end of the Adirondacks to attend college at St. Lawrence University. In the second semester of my first year at SLU, I took one of those classes that forever changes who you are and how you look at the world. It was a multi-disciplinary class based on the life and impact of Woody Guthrie, who to this day I still consider my favorite historical hero and inspiration. In the years that followed I traded a pencil for guitar.

Then roughly three years after college, for reasons I can no longer recall, I started drawing again. A lot. For six months or so I was working exclusively in charcoal, doing a lot of simple practice sketches that didn’t amount to much….almost like practicing scales on an instrument. I wasn’t particularly good at it and I didn’t know what it was leading to but for some reason I kept doing it anyway. Then one nice and sunny day in the month of April I decided to give painting a try, and it was a revelation. I hadn’t painted in years, and even then I had barely gotten my feet wet. Yet somehow it seemed incredibly intuitive. Time seemed to disappear and it felt like I was tapping into a part of my mind that I seemed to fall just short of when drawing or writing music. From that point on, painting was my primary medium.

I still draw and still play music. I also still try to keep a little bit of the spirit of Woody Guthrie alive in my painting, even if only in an esoteric fashion. I haven’t written an artist statement yet, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. As far as I know Woody never wrote an artist statement in any official capacity, but he did write something in a newspaper column which sounds a lot like one:
'I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.'
- Woody Guthrie.

I will eventually write a proper artist statement. In the meantime, I’m borrowing my philosophical guiding light from Woody. It seemed to work for Bob Dylan…