My first memory of art production was as a three-year-old making shapes and animals out of balls of colored clay on a refitted merchant ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. My Hungarian parents and I were among more than 1,000 refugees and displaced persons sailing from Bremerhaven, Germany to Ellis Island, New York aboard USS General W. C. Langfitt in 1951. I spoke no English when I entered an American kindergarten, but I impressed my teacher with my drawing and coloring skills. Maybe it started then, what I now call an art career. 

After finishing a degree in arts and sciences at the University of Dayton with a major in fine arts, I completed a certificate in painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1975. Thereafter, I moved to Santa Fe, NM where I exhibited and taught art until relocating to Pennsylvania by 1993. I exhibited with the Perkiomen Valley Art Center and other venues through 2011 when I became a studio artist at the Goggleworks Art Center in Reading, PA for seven years until 2018. Today, I work out of a large studio attached to our home in Stowe, PA.

Philosophies and schools of art bewilder new and old students of art history. My hard-working Hungarian father (may he rest in peace) never quite got why his son would drop out of engineering to pursue fine arts. His primary question was, “How ze hell you vill make living?” I had a knack for capturing likenesses in art school, so I was able to supplement my sporadic income from “fine art” sales by doing street portraits at malls, fairs, resorts, and on the Santa Fe Plaza for 14 years—over 7,000 pastel and charcoal heads over that stretch. If I have a philosophy of art, it is rudimentary: Making special.  Making words special is poetry. Making sounds special is music. Making myth special is religion. We use film, photography, drawing, painting, and sculpting to make images special. Using your body in dance is making movement special. Homo sapiens makes art by making special things. 

Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why by Ellen Dissanayake (1992) is one good source for my philosophy of art. She argues on page 34 that producing art or “making special” is a “biological need” for Homo sapiens, no less than our needs for food, self-defense, and language. In the late 1960s, I carried a quote around with me in a sketch book: Making art is not required for physical existence, but it is necessary for our mental existence. When cave art appeared around 60,000 years ago, humans became fascinated with mirroring ideas in images. Picasso once quipped, “After Altamira, all is decadence. We have invented nothing.” I think he meant that we are merely continuing the process that the first cave artists began. The enigmatic Spaniard, Picasso, also said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

At this stage in my career, I let ideas emerge in small sketches until one feels like a fun thing to try on canvas. My approach is loose, for the most part, and my content comes from my interests in social interaction and life forms. I employ animal images more than human ones. I knock out an expressionist portrait now and then.  Abstract flourishes, splashes, and brush marks provide accents like spices in an entree. My work, I believe, is often food for thought!