My first art memory is painting the family basement when I was five. My mom and I each had a brush (one big, one small) and an assigned area to cover. I painted my square with images of drag-racing motorcycles. Mom called out to me, “Not gonna get much painting done drawing motorcycles.” I dropped my brush, looked at her nearly finished section of wall and said, “I want to draw motorcycles.” She stopped, looked at me, and splashed out a motorcycle drawing with her brush. I remember to this day how lame it looked compared to mine. I made drawings in my space until it was covered with paint.
My next art memory was sitting in a class of high school kids, one tiny five-year old kid among a couple dozen big kids. We were all waiting for an art teacher to show up, a high school teacher running an extracurricular afterschool program. Somehow my mom had signed me up—against the rules I’m sure—for this class.
The teacher was late. A big clock on the wall started ticking louder, marking time to the thud in my chest. I was already scared when the big kids began to notice me. They laughed, pointed fingers, and jeered. Tears ran down my face as I hid underneath the desk. They looked like giant, savage chimpanzees. Crawling under the desk only made them laugh louder. I wondered if my life wasn’t actually in danger. There were mean dogs in our neighborhood so I knew from experience crouching in the fetal position only encouraged predators. In a panic, I ran to the front of the room, grabbed a chair and a piece of chalk, and stood the chair near the blackboard.
In no time I had drawn a huge brontosaurus. The big kids became less threatening as we all made drawings on the blackboard. I think I was kicked out of that class a few weeks later for disruptive behavior. Throughout my school years I constantly made drawings on blackboards for my classmates.
At Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose I was forced to take Latin I, II, and III all at once in my Senior year. I eventually wound up spending most of the long dreary hours of Latin instruction drawing complicated blackboard scenes from Roman history and labeling every object I drew with its Latin name. For instance, dictionary in hand, I might draw a scene of Hannibal riding a war elephant down the Alps to invade Rome.
The word “elephantus” would appear underneath Hannibal’s steed. Trees, rivers, everything was labeled in Latin. I learned a huge number of nouns and nothing else since I couldn’t follow the lecture while making drawings. It was enough earn straight Bs in my highly unorthodox Latin curriculum. During my high school years I made about 50 oil-on-canvass paintings; some are still floating around.
My next set of art memories is painting street murals in East Los Angeles, next to Hispanic street artists. I would create images of Teutonic knights fighting dragons. “This is diversity homies,” I would explain to my buddies. Kicked out of college for covering dorm hallways with bizarre paintings, I had decided to do street art for a few months. It was only a short interruption from a career in the retail car business; which ended in the mid-80s when I was in my late 20s. The only thing I liked about the car business was designing advertising campaigns. I just can’t stand doing anything that isn’t creative. So I quit the business world and became a fulltime artist.
I have been a professional sculptor for the last few decades. Ever since my early 30s, I have deliberately refused to draw or paint except as a tool for sculpture. I would draw a proposal for a potential client or blueprints for a thirty foot long dinosaur but I would never create a painting for the sake of creating a painting. I spent decades making only three-dimensional art because I wasn’t ready to make the big jump.
A year ago I made the jump. All that sculpting has given me enough training and courage to tackle Abstract Expressionism. Creating an image that truly expresses a human emotion in the abstract is a singular achievement. This is what I’m doing with the rest of my life.
Dave is represented in Scottsdale, Arizona by Xanadu Gallery and in Santa Fe, New Mexico by Adieb Khadoure Fine Art.
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