1981

Rosco Louie Gallery, Easter 1981. Paintings on plastic and aluminum sheets, drawing with hard pastel on colored paper.
In June of 1981, I moved to New York City. I had been telling people since my arrival in Seattle that I was "practicing for the big time" which was kind of true considering how much of a change Seattle was from Eureka.
I wanted to continue working with Larry and Tracy and the Rosco Louie Gallery and before I left, I did a short "Easter Exhibition" in the back room.

New York.
Once I was living and working in Manhattan, the need to ship an entire show cheaply resulted in a very "flat" exhibition at the end of 1981. Initially I was living in an awful little fourth floor walk-up on the Lower East Side - Second Street and Avenue C. All very posh now days, but in 1981 it looked a bit more like one of those post-apocalypse movies with fires burning nightly mid-intersection and stripped cars askew on the sidewalks. At Sophie's (6th and A), cops from the 9th Precinct explained that I was living in the worst building in the worst block in the worst precinct in Manhattan.
So, I got lucky and found a place over in the West Village on West Tenth Street. Still a fourth floor walk-up but now with two small rooms. All of the work for the next show was done there.
Documentation improved with the help of a professional photographer friend and there's a hint of an upcoming body of work that occurred in the December exhibition: Immediately upon arriving in Manhattan, and not being too sure as to what ART really was, I became convinced that if a famous artist like Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock was ART then just their names alone had a quality and if I wrote or painted their names... well, then that was ART.
A few years later, all I was doing was painting names.

Rosco Louie Gallery, Seattle, December, 1981