1979
After the show of drawings at and/or Gallery, I felt that my time with that wad of work, pencil and hard pastel on large sheets of paper, was finally finished after 8 years. I was geting very interested in the whole punk thing, feeling a connection, not feeling as out of place as I had for all those hippie years - especially in Northern California. I wanted to paint, to get very sloppy, and make things that made me feel like the new music was making me feel.
The rent was going up on the top floor apartment overlooking Freeway Park I'd been in since arriving and they weren't going to let me paint there anyway, so I moved to the North end of Beacon Hill, to a place on Sturgus Avenue, long gone to make way for the I-90 expansion in the 1980s. I gave up my incredible views of the Olympic Mountains for a $25 a month apartment where no one would mind how much paint I threw around. Naturally, money played a part since I had to borrow the $25 for my first month's rent.
I started painting on stretched clear vinyl and salvaged (litho-plates) aluminum sheets and, since I had this (relatively) nice big room, began making scaled up versions of the model airplanes I'd loved making since childhood.
The idea during this period was to make images and objects that looked like "The Clash" sounded.
Documentation was still very minimal. When additional photos are found, they will be added.
Rosco Louie
The first of many exhibitions with Larry Reid and Tracy Rowland at the Rosco Louie Gallery on Washington Street in Seattle began with a group show "The Armory Show " in December of 1979.
The power of the fluke, the chance situation: Ries Niemi, who'd I'd met at some party along with his wife Sheila Klein, and I connected (probably about contemporary music) and he came by the studio right at the point the MiG-25 shown below in the studio photos was completed. He knew Larry and Tracy were planning a show to inaugurate their new gallery and he made the introduction. The MiG-25 was in that show and graced the cover of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's "206 Magazine" heralding the beginning of punk art in America.
The first two images below are the initial paintings on clear vinyl. Then a group of works also done in 1979 and shown in early 1980 at Rosco Louie in my first true solo art exhibition.