Graduate School Gallery
I attended Graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I was lucky enough to meet someone who changed my life as a painter. William C. Collins was in his last year of teaching before his retirement when I was in my first year. Bill was what could be described as a curmudgeon. A caustic little Irishman with a wealth of intelligence, life experience, and an ability to reduce any one of his students to tears in a sentence. My hero. Bill, however, was a carbon copy of my Grandfather; a nasty little Irishman in his own right. So, I was familiar with his disposition.

Within his acidic criticism could be found the meaning of what painting is and what it is to be a painter. From Professor Collins I learned how to structure a painting and how to organize color relationships. That irregardless of style and/or technique, at the end of the day, good painting is a proper arrangement of colors, values, and shapes. The Photoresist and the Non-Objective painter answer to the same tradition.

The true understanding of this did not come to fruition for years with me.

These are some examples of my Thesis show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. They certainly do not have any of the attributes mentioned above. This show was, in a sense, about getting out of graduate School. However, I was very interested in the mystery of the covered form. By partially exposing the human form, the viewer is forced to imagine what the rest of the figure is doing. In many of these paintings the perversions of the individual viewers are revealed. In all of the paintings there is only one figure. Several comments were made about Shell of Myself. The model is laying on her back with her left hip slung over to her right side and she has placed her hands around her hip. Well, what did you think was going on?

PERVERT!!!