Oil on Canvas, 1987, 36 x 78, 2 panels
The sources for this painting are a photo and
a pencil drawing of myself both made when I
was about 15 1/2 or 16. The photo shows a typical Bronx neighborhood with
its mostly walk-up tenements, garbage pails and garbage at the curbside.
We used to play what in New York City is called stick ball, a street variation
on baseball, using a broom stick and a rubber ball with lots of bounce.
During the summer of the snapshot I was on a team that reached that pinnacle
of success where the games it played were the basis for several hundred
dollars worth of bets on a typical Saturday morning. What can I tell you?
You were nervous, especially a chubby kid like me for whom stick ball was
both a struggle and a joy. But you felt real good.
As for the self-portrait, the drawing, you have to pay especial attention to the signature. How to sign your work was as much a matter for mastery as making the work itself, since for some reason that had a lot to do with immortality.
It's hard to know whether the self-portrait reflects adolescent intensity or just staring hard into a mirror, though I do know that to want to be an artist was a desire most intense. And hard to remember much more about that summer of turning 16 and hard to know how much of what I remember is like the memory of an accident, not what's known but what's constructed in the dim light of a few glowing sensations.