Back Cover of BRIDGE

Through my twenties and into my thirties, the era of my professional life as an artist, I was basically a rationalist and a secular humanist, pretty much the ‘religion’ of my main mentors in higher education. I was beyond church-going religion, regarding it as old hat and without merit. I was an abstract expressionist and proud of it and an idealist concerned with justice and human dignity for all. But under this high-sounding cover some pathologizing was going on, that is, there were multiple rivulets sneaking out of me, like secret clues to the sickness and chaos that was roiling deep inside me. They poured out through the chinks in my armour, especially in regard sexuality, masculine identity, personal fears and anxiety, and eventually became part of my creative expression. My marriage was also rocked by these new powers in my consciousness. Beneath my cool and confident exterior self was an inner self set upon by demons and a chaos that I soon realized I had to address or be permanently crippled psychologically. It was like Persephone being dragged down into darkness by Hades. I began to see things as if through a glass darkly and this dark vision deepen when I went to UNLV to teach. By my fifth year in Las Vegas I saw academe as snake pit of vicious scholars; art was a profession and practice that had no meaning beyond its own definition; creativity was a desacralized thing that was turning into a secular exercise in the marketplace. The Vietnam War had painted my horizon’s black, so I quit painting and started drawing in pen and ink—forgetting Pollock and embracing George Grosz and Max Beckmann as my new role models. Bridge in the Fog deals with my transition from a soul lost to one found