If You Understand
"If you understand your painting before you paint it. You might as well not paint it!” Dali
People often ask where I found the inspiration to paint. I tell them it began in childhood, watching my aunt Myrna paint a mural of a lion on our foyer wall.
Did I ever take lessons? No—never. It was all trial and error. I’ve always loved lectures, but I don’t like being lectured to.
When did I start painting? It truly began the day I went to a show at MoMA in Queens to see a Picasso and Matisse exhibition with friends. I had an epiphany right then. I told myself, “This is it. I can do this.” And now, I could fill several museums with my work
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I learned more from listening to discussions about the great masters—Picasso, Miró, Dalí, Renoir, John Singer Sargent, Manet, and others—and from studying their works than I ever could have learned in a classroom. I also learned from hands-on experience building homes from the ground up with my dad a master craftsman and his crew, and from my music career—learning from the titans of music about freedom, expression, and spirit.
Some of the most valuable time I ever spent were the years I worked as a gallery director, studying the works of the great artists and photographers whose shows I curated, in those long, silent hours that shape the everyday life of a working gallery.
There is never a right or wrong time to change your life and begin doing something you love. What matters is that when the moment arrives, you have the courage and the will to follow it through and keep going.
In the end, people often ask where spirit, beauty, or inspiration truly come from—as if they can be taught like steps in a lesson.
But spirit cannot be taught, and beauty cannot be diagrammed. They are the natural conclusion of a life fully lived—the sum of every experience, set free from constraint. What I create now is shaped by every memory, every mistake, every sound, every stroke—by everything the world has whispered to me rather than anything I’ve been instructed to do. When the mind is unbound and the heart is allowed to move without fear, inspiration arrives on its own terms, and art becomes the echo of a life finally set free.
Once you grasp that, you become unstoppable in everything you choose to do
