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I was quite young, maybe in 1st or 2nd grade when I can remember flipping through the pages of a series of Time-Life books on various institutions on Art; such as the Louver, the Palace of Versailles and the art in the Vatican City. I couldn’t believe that people can paint this kind of realism (Keep in mind I’m only six or seven years old and my experience with painting was quite limited.).
Sometime during the summer of 1975, when I was 11 years old, I was dragged thru the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; I didn’t see anything that appealed to me, but I do remember standing with a crowd of people observing Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”. Only a few months later, on September 14, 1975, a deranged man took a knife to the work. I wondered, “What would make a person go to that extreme about a work of art?”
I thought that was pretty powerful that Art could do something like that to a person.
It was around this time that I learned of Kurt Schwitters. I looked up my last name in our Encyclopedia and was started to find a name listed! I read his entry and learned a great deal about him.
My opinions on Art at this point was that it could be pretty powerful stuff. In my teen years I grew to become a pretty competent illustrator favoring pen and ink to express my visions. I grew frustrated that drawing was so slow and I didn't have a photographic memory. The point to Art, I thought, was to capture an image. I had a burning desire to capture images and wanted a new tool to do so. I got myself a camera. In high school, I wanted to join the school’s newspaper’s staff as a cartoonist, following Mark Kostabi. I made the “mistake” of showing up to the interview with my camera slung over my shoulder. I was immediately “hired” to be the staff photographer, and in doing so, plunging all my efforts into the job and loving every moment and never turning back.
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