I was born in Chicago, September 21, 1948, and have lived here for most of my life, on the same street. I grew up in the house next door, and moved here after I married. I've traveled a fair amount over the years, mostly in the United States. My education was unremarkable, in fact, most of my life has been pretty unremarkable, at least that would be an outsider's view. When I was a small child, my grandfather told me that it was not the streets in America that were paved in gold, but the alleys. I thought that he was being silly, but later, as an adult, I realized that he was not entirely wrong. A person who knows only the streets of his or her neighborhood does not know their neighborhood. It is like knowing how to drive a car, but knowing nothing of what lies under the hood.
My life today is fairly disciplined, when I am not painting, I am doing some other sort of other work around the place, keeping it clean, doing the laundry, fixing things that break down, and walking my dog. She shares my like for the alleys, and the darker, dirtier places, and their inhabitants. Sometimes I wish I could see the things that she see with her nose, and paint them that way, so she could sniff one of my paintings, and think, yeah, I know that place...