The beginnings

The idea of the Hieroglyphic Theater began to germinate in my head that first summer in Eugene in 1969. I was determined to move away from my "horror period" in Vegas as drawing all that grim, ugly stuff had finally got to me. Within a couple of weeks I was at the drawing board and for the next several weeks I experiment with a few ideas. I had plenty of time on my hands, especially when Sue started summer school, a class on the History of Theater. The first series of drawings were pretty rough and inconclusive but did look promising. The black ball, a spin-off symbol derived from the black pearl necklace a former lover had given Sue before we got together. I equated the ball/pearl with Sue's extra-marital sex activity which she wasted little time getting into our first year of marriage. In brief, although I knew about the men, indeed, they were all part of our circle of friends and acquaintances in California and Las Vegas. I did see her activity as suspect, as black, that is, hurtful for me. I hardly remember the first batch of drawings I did, they were that vague and unfocused. But what was consistent was the black ball showed up in every image. One night she decided to meet a classmate at a play on campus and I stayed home to read. Actually I wanted to masturbate as we hadn't made love since summer school started. I was sleep when she got home. She had gone out with some people after the play. One of those people was Brent Armstrong the cat from Yale who taught that History of Theater class. She didn't tell me about hm till about a year later, although that late night made me wonder what was going on. He was her first score in Eugene. She told me later that she had given him a blow job in his office on Campus. Such is how our first year in Eugene started.  Why she didn't tell me about the cat around the time it happened, I don't know. She wanted to fuck whoever she wanted and in the back of her mind she did not believe we were going to stay a couple, as I just not the physical type she preferred. She might have accelerated the process if I had know from the start. And of course this applies to the Larry romance as well when we got back to Las Vegas. None of her lovers were marrying material. It's interesting that that never happened.

The best drawing in that original batch of drawings was "The Alchemist,"which is owned by Stan Nishimura. All things considered that axial period in my development lasted from 1969 to 1973 when I finally hit stride with a different style and altered content that followed two intertwined elements, a fresh new symbology based on The Hermetic Tradition, and the shadowed sexual activity of my wife over time, a combination that fueled many a drawing going forward. (This is why I felt the way I wrote "Bridge in the Fog" was justifiable and to the point, whereas Sue thought I should skip the personal stuff and discuss only relevant art. But to leave out the sex stuff leaves out an explanation why so many drawing look the way they do. To fully connected on image and meaning the two things meld together.) The idea for H.T.came from an esoteric source, from a Renaissance  humanist, Pico Della Mirandola, who saw man as a creature who exists on the demonic middle level between the beasts below and the angels above. It was man's duty to elevate himself  above "the dung-heap of the inferior world." What an irresistible goal! Image=three-decked cosmos='hieroglyphs'=a deep way of stating hidden truths related to a sacred universe. I am a myth-maker who needs to operate with a mask on. One must remain sly and hidden--a shadow without a shadow.