Biography Page 3
During this time Carl had joined a band playing keyboard with a trust fund baby who owned ‘Kona Gold Recording’. I had done the logo for the studio and helped create a look and feel for the band, which was a new wave, punk type of group. I had also done an Album Cover for a Hawaiian band called Hapalaka (Wild Horse) in Hawaiian. I was now doing logos for local business, painting windows of shops for the holidays, and working on a collection of pen and ink drawings of fantasy worlds with surreal people and dragon type creatures. This was a very fertile time for my mind. We swam on private beaches that had changed little since the beginning of time, we learned to swim with large sea turtles, and hike to caves that held ancient secrets. There was a great mythology to Hawaii and easy to draw inspiration from the people and the environment.
On my off time I would listen to Carl’s band rehearse and sketch each of them. Consequently I became very familiar with their songs. Their lead singer was a girl named Angel. The band had gotten a gig to open up for Chaka Kahn at the Kona Surf. The nights before they were supposed to play Angel came down with a bad case of laryngitis. They asked me if I would fill in for her since I was familiar with the songs. So I said yes. All I remember is standing on the stage thinking, what the hell am I doing, then thinking you better do something the music is starting, so I turned the songs into my own versions of punk performance art and somehow got through the hour and a half. Afterwards they decided they liked what I did and I suddenly I was a singer in a punk band. We recorded a four-song e.p. and one of the songs called ‘Direct Inject’ went to the top ten Hawaiian play list, one of the D.J.’s in Honolulu loved it. A few months later we were contacted by an L.A. record label that want to sign us to a development deal in Los Angeles. So we move to L.A. and start playing the L.A. clubs and Universities. We place a couple of our songs on the College Play List in Billboard Magazine. We start recording in the best studios and are getting ready to sign with a label. One day Carl and I are walking in the park thinking to ourselves how contrived the music scene in L.A. is getting. We are drinking vials of ginseng and royal jelly. We think wouldn’t it be cool to create a healthy energy drink. This is in 1986 before the energy revolution. There were only a couple of items on the market in that genre. So as two artists that know nothing about business we decide to start a company called Precise Nutrition that manufactures the Vital 4-u line of energy drinks. I go back to art to support our business venture.
We quit the band. I now start showing in a few L.A. art galleries, plus Nicky Blair’s restaurant in Hollywood. I am now drawing in graphite and charcoal, large scale portraits of movie legends, erotica and monsters.
One day I get a call from a man who has seen my work at a patron’s house. He wants to come to my studio and when he does he commissions’ twelve life-sized drawings of Monsters, everything from Bella Lugosi’s Dracula to Lone Chaney Sr.’s Phantom. This man was building a castle in L.A. and wanted to hang original art of these characters. I think this is the perfect job for me.
Carl and I decide to move to the desert of California, we had heard that the art scene in Palm Desert was really starting to happen and also we could run our energy business from there with less stress and less money. So we moved to the desert. We rent a house with a great studio, equipped with rattlesnakes, black widows and various other desert dwellers. I immediately get involved with the local art scene all the while working on my monster series. I started showing with Valerie Miller who also handled some of the artist I admired from California, Billy Al Bangston, Lita Albuquerque, and Laddie John Dill.
In the meantime I begin working in clay, thinking perhaps I can take a second job as an assistant in a local studio and afford the cost of casting in bronze. So I took a job with a local sculptor doing design drawing and sculpting. This sculptor was John Kennedy who had started his career quite late in his life. We collaborated on a few pieces, one called ‘Strange Duet’. Which was close to the style I continue to work in today. During this time (1994) the man who had commissioned me to do the artwork for his castle commissioned me to do a monumental piece of art. A twenty-foot dragon cast in bronze to grace the moat in front of his castle. By now I had been casting my own smaller pieces and had a good relationship with Les Brown, owner of Metal Arts Foundry in Paso Robles. I put a team together, contacted my mentor Bill Hilbert from Hawaii who came in on the project as a consultant and also because he had been so good to me while under his tutelage in Hawaii.
We installed the dragon in 1996 and I now had a large body of figurative work in cast bronze. I had gone through teaching myself to draw, paint, weld fabricated steel, to sculpting and casting in bronze. My work was being shown in sculpture gardens, private collections, a city hall and galleries.
Somewhere during that time I married my best friend Carl. And then at the age of fifty I received a commission from Kemper Development Co. to create and cast a fifty one foot bronze sculpture to grace the entrance of Bellevue Place in Bellevue Washington.
In 2005 I installed the 51 ft tall sculpture at Bellevue Place In Bellevue Washington. From 2005 to current I have been working with Hard Rock Corp installing sculptures in various cafes around the world and have been working on numerous private commissions.
Gesso Cocteau 2010
