Biography Page 2
During this time we discovered the quaint and picturesque town of Leavenworth. I then switched from drawing the portraits of people to the portraits of log cabins, bears, eagles and deer. When the apple season was over and the harvest complete, it was starting to get very cold living in the car. We had learned that if we stayed in Washington we could start pruning the trees at the end of winter and then thin them in spring and then it would be summer and the harvest would begin again. One day we were driving through the Cascadian town we loved and saw an old farmhouse that sat on twenty-one acres of land. There was a sign in the window that said ‘Recording Studio’. Since Carl played guitar and piano and we both loved music we were intrigued. A local neighbor who was feeding his pigs told us the man who owned the house was a surgeon who lived in Yakima. He had just bought the house and no one was living there. That evening we were in town trying to escape the ‘fall night freezing’, we drank a bottle of wine from the local wine cellar. We got just brave enough and just drunk enough to call this Doctor and tell him our story. You know we’re artist turned migrant worker and we’ll be willing to house sit and by the way I will do a nice portrait of your wife, your kids or your house. He was very kind, he liked that we were freezing starving artist and he said we could live there the winter as long as we would feed the horses he was bringing up to the farm in a couple of weeks. He told us to meet him there in two weeks at which time he would give us the keys and we could move in. We were ecstatic! So to summarize Washington. beautiful, artistic, breathtaking and memorable.
We moved in that winter where from October until February I was able to draw and paint and make sculpture out of found wood. I did my first show that winter at a local Bakery. It was a series of pen and ink drawings of people and animals. I sold my first piece there, it was a bear. For three years I spent the winters drawing and painting and sculpting and then we would leave for the summers to follow the fruit. During that time I sketched up in the trees, down in the grass, in streams, in my V.W. van. That’s all I remember about myself during those years, sketchpad, pencils and a knife to sharpen them. In the fall I took to riding my bike to remote places where I would sketch the old log cabins and farmhouses. I would then knock on their doors asking for a dollar or two in exchange for the drawing. Riding back through town with my day’s wage I would stop and pick up a fresh loaf of bread from the incredible local bakery and a bottle of cabernet and some cheese. Back home Carl and I would drink our wine and eat our dinner discussing the philosophy of Carlos Castaneda, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the politics of Jimmy Carter. After a few years of mountain living we decided we were cold. One winter’s day I said to Carl “I wonder what it’s like to live in Hawaii” he said, “I don’t know why don’t we move there and find out. So we did. We sold our faithful 68 Red and White van and moved to the Kona Coast. I had heard about a man who had worked as a special effects technician for Disney. He had moved to Kona and started a graphics studio. My goal was to interview with him and try to get a job as one of his assistants. He was an incredible artist with a range of talent from painting surreal fantasy subjects in the style of Frazetta, to sculpting other world creatures in various mediums. He also did some of the most intricate pointiism in pen and ink that I have ever seen.
For the time being to make some much needed food money I drew Hawaiian super heroes and sat on the main drag of Kona, known as Alii Drive, Avenue of the Kings, and sold my heroes to tourist. After a few months of living in Hawaii I put a portfolio of my fantasy drawings and paintings, mainly scenes of men and women living in prehistoric, futuristic worlds along with dragons. I was obsessed with human anatomy and dragons. At this time I was living in a coffee shack, these were tin roof unfinished Hawaiian shacks, no running water, but a catchment for the rain that fell every afternoon along with our daily rainbows of the island. We had no plumbing but an outhouse, which sat a half-mile from the shack. Wild boars loved to congregate there because it sat beneath a mango tree and they would eat the ripened fruit that fell from the tree; sometimes you could not get in the outhouse as they became possessive of the tree and surrounding areas. I found that if I started singing they would slowly leave, I don’t know if I was insulted or relieved. One day Carl rode me down to the little town of Kona, (we had a Honda 350 for transportation). This was in the late 70’s. I took my portfolio to the graphic studio and went inside and started asking about an assistant’s job. A man who looked like Gandalf sat stroking his beard, listening to me and looking through my portfolio. He gave me a job working five days a week designing signs, the sixth day I cleaned the studio and on Sunday he taught me about his method of painting and drawing. His name was Bill Hilbert, and he was the most gracious and giving mentor I ever came across. He wanted me to succeed. He would listen to me go on about anatomy and dragons for hours and he would work with me on my style of dragon scales for months. All I did in Hawaii was draw and paint and it was there I started to work in clay. The cost of casting was still so far out of reach for me I could only dream of that medium.
