Dawning The fact is that even though I had now been accepted into Cornish College's 5th Year Program, I didn't quite understand what had happened. I worked with a possessed fervor, almost solely just being happy in my space - both physically and mentally. It was like the way teenagers do with the gas pedal - push it to the floor just to see how fast the car will go.

I spent all my time in my studio, blasting the music and drinking coffee like a fish. All the works were big - as large as a sheet of plywood.

But it took about six months - until February before it began to dawn on me what was going on. The marvelous albeit quiet thing that my brilliant advisor Kathleen Rabel had said was

"just work, and don't be careful"

That was what I had been doing. Years of previous work had been carefully controlled - and with pleasing results TECHNICALLY - but my new work was in a totally different world.

That key element: recklessness. And it gradually began to come into focus that that was the key to Art itself. I had to admit that the faculty weren't wrong - they turned me down for a reason. And now it unleashed a ferocious wave of something: floodgates opening, the freedom to let it all pour out. For this I will always be supremely grateful.

Artist Statement Artist's Statements are usually pitiful and only ever ruin the artist's work.

I wasn't interested in capturing "cars" or anything like that. I wouldn't have been an automotive designer or a illustrator for automotive magazine. Wrong direction, wrong soul. Someone was often asking me "is your work about cars? I said No. Well what IS your work about? came the inevitable question.

I used to say COFFEE, ROCK & ROLL, and HORSEPOWER.

They always say no no- seriously. What were you thinking ?

What were you trying to do?

paintings from this period

Three Ring The circus was going full tilt, and sure enough there were three rings. Not only was I riding the crest of totally unexpected wave of artistic frenzy, but Jonathan had come in one day and said a sentence which included the word racing in it. Oh God, here we go. So I had started racing motorcycles in earnest. The two of us Road Raced for the next seven years.

On top of that found myself going though that devastating once in a lifetime heartbreak that most everyone has at some point. There folllowed the predictable sine wave of anguish and then determination, despair and then teeth gritting. And something came out of it, seen below. At first I was afraid to show these to anyone, which is why the paper to cover it up, flipped up over the wall.

At one point I did get a call from an attorney demanding that I change the name of my paintings to "Vise - Grip" since it wasn't plural- and to add a registered trademark symbol if I wouldn't mind. works from these years

Fall 1990 - two versions of Vise-Grips

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