I was twenty-four years old and I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I knew I could draw. I knew I loved the feel of a burin moving across a copper plate — the resistance, the precision, the permanent mark of it. And I knew that on Sunday mornings I could set up a folding table on the Santa Barbara beach boardwalk, lay out my etchings, and see whether the world agreed with my private assessment of them.
The world was equivocal. On cloudy days, when people felt the weight of something they couldn’t name, they would stop, look at the work, and sometimes buy. On sunny days — blue sky, warm Pacific light, everyone feeling fine — they kept walking. I learned something important from this. Art reaches people at the edge of things. It finds them in the gap between who they are and who they’re trying to become.
I didn’t know then that I was already working out the themes I would spend the next four decades exploring. Looking at those etchings now — the ones I sold for thirty or forty dollars on the boardwalk — I can see it clearly. The hand reaching upward, water dripping from the fingertips, tiny birds scattered through the field like thoughts. Cupped palms releasing a dove. A figure playing a flute against the vast silence of the American Southwest, music rising into the sky as birds. A creek forcing its way between immovable rocks.
These weren’t student exercises. They were a twenty-four-year-old asking, in the only language he had: What is it to reach? What is it to release? What moves through the resistant material of the world?
The hand keeps appearing in my work. It appeared in those 1981 etchings. It appeared in a colored aquatint I made a year later — two open palms cradling the space between them, a dove lifting above. It appears in my paintings now, decades on: a single hand reaching against blue, paint-streaked and urgent. I think the hand is how I talk about making. About the act of committing — pressing something into being and not knowing, until the last moment, what it will be.
There is a continuous thread from the Santa Barbara boardwalk to the galleries and corporate stages I work in today. The questions are the same. The hand is the same. What has changed is only the scale of the canvas and the confidence with which I press in.
I still have some of those original etchings. I’m glad I do. They remind me that the searching doesn’t end — it just gets more articulate.