Starting Over at 80
My new life as an artist
Until I was 40 years old and already halfway through my teaching career, I hadn’t given a thought to what my retirement might be like. That stage of my life still seemed very distant. I half-heartedly started making financial arrangements, but I didn’t think about what I would actually do with all the free time I would have. But as I’ll show, my future already lay far back in the past.
Art
In high school in the late 1950’s I began to develop an interest in art. With New York City just a 45-minute bus ride from my hometown in New Jersey, I began visiting the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I can’t say that I understood all of the works I saw, but I enjoyed what I was seeing and wanted to learn more.
Back then I could not have envisioned actually making art myself. What I saw in the museums was too awe-inspiring.
Art and sexuality
Art and sexuality have been closely connected for millennia. For example, archaeologists unearthed an ivory statuette called the Venus of Hohle Fels, which is estimated to be anywhere between 30,000 and 40,000 years old. The statuette clearly has sex and reproduction as its theme.
Not surprisingly, my interest in art intersected with my growing interest in girls. There were several girls in my high school class who were into art and design. But there were two who especially caught my eye.
Diana
Diana was a raven-haired beauty who looked like Sophia Lauren. A gifted artist, she painted in both oil and watercolor, and drew charcoal sketches as well. She wasn’t part of the social circle I was in, nor was she in the social circle of the other girl artists, who were cheerleaders and members of the clique of popular people.
I was somewhat intimidated and never got up the nerve to talk with her. Many years later I learned that both she and her husband were successful commercial artists and that their three kids were all artists.
Kathy
Kathy was another gifted artist, but her elaborate oil paintings were filled with gravestones, corpses, bloody knives, and zombies. She always wore all black: black sweater, black skirt, black stockings, and black fingernails. Today she would be called “Goth”.
I wanted to get to know her but she seemed terrified when I tried to talk to her about her paintings. I didn’t pursue her any further and I never found out what became of her.
An attempt at oil painting
I was intrigued by the idea of making oil paintings myself and decided to try my hand at it. I bought a set of paints and an easel and ventured out to make my first canvas. I chose as my subject the former “Crystal Lake” railroad station in Franklin Lakes, NJ.
If the wonderful PBS series on painting by William Alexander and Bob Ross had been on TV at the time, I would have had some idea of how to do the painting. The reality was, I had no clue.
A less-than-successful first effort
The station painting was a botched job from beginning to end. Discouraged, I brought the canvas home and then just forgot about it. Years later, I found it framed and hanging in the back bedroom where my wife and I would stay when visiting my parents.
My mom told me the painting was an important historical piece because it was the only known image of the Crystal Lake station, which had been demolished to make way for commercial buildings.
It turns out Mom was wrong. I found a photo of the Crystal Lake station on the Bergen County (NJ) commissioner’s website.
My painting shows the station from approximately the same distance and viewing angle as in this photograph.
When my parents decided to move to a retirement community, Mom donated the painting to the Franklin Lakes Public Library, where it hangs to this day. I’ve occasionally thought of asking the library to take it down.
The New York art scene
When I went away to college I majored in music but also did a minor in art history. Since my school was a 45-minute bus ride into New York City, I was able to continue going to my favorite museums.
At the same time, the art scene in the city was exploding with new kinds of art: Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art among the best known. A couple of the artists were faculty members at my college. I got to go to their exhibitions and shows and attend gallery openings in the city.
I decide to continue on in music
I went on to get a Master's degree in music and then got a job teaching music at the local state teacher's college. At that time, computers were becoming more accessible. The state government established a centralized computer system that served all of the public colleges and universities in the state.
While I was an undergraduate, I had briefly been allowed to use a computer owned by the Physics Department, but now I could log on to the state system any time I wanted.
Early computer art
No computer skills were required for my music teaching (how that has changed!) but I had seen a bit of “computer art” and wanted to try to make some. One of the earliest forms of computer art involved making pictures using the characters available on a printer or Teletype, that is, the upper- and lower-case letters, the digits 0 to 9, and “special characters” such as !@#$%^&*()_=, etc. The set of all 95 characters is known as “ASCII”, American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Some of the early ASCII artists were quite resourceful in their use of what was an extremely limited medium. Until recently I didn’t realize that ASCII art had continued as an art form right up to today.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save any of my own work, but there are many websites with examples of all different kinds of ASCII images. Here is a typical example of geometric abstraction rendered in ASCII:
Career change
After a dozen years teaching music, in 1980 I was offered the opportunity to become a member of the newly formed Computer Science Department. Although this gave me access to vastly increased computing power, I didn’t immediately try to do anything artistic; however, by that time there was already an established practice called “computer art” and I had seen some of the outstanding published examples.
The key moment
The key moment in my development as an artist (although I didn’t realize it at the time) was a session I attended at a computer conference in 1993. The French biochemist and crystallographer, Gerard Langlet (1940–1996), presented a small computer program that provided a simple way of describing how natural objects such as flowers, crystals, and snowflakes take on the shapes they have. Just by giving his program a few numbers as inputs, it could create a seemingly endless variety of both natural and fantastic shapes,
Langlet’s program generated images in black and white. I wrote my own versions of the program in different programming languages and began turning out colored images. Here are two examples:
I didn’t see myself then as an artist using a new medium to make art. I was just fascinated by all the different forms I could create.
I take a chance
A few years ago, now retired, I collected some of my best images and sent them off to an art professor at the University of Northern Colorado, a well-known computer artist. I basically just asked her: “Is this computer art?” As I recall, she didn’t flatly say yes or no, but instead encouraged me to continue doing what I was doing.
Some successes
After two or three years, we started working together on art projects and submitting our work to juried exhibitions. Right away, to my astonishment, we received a couple of “honorable mention” type awards. At this point, I began to take making computer art seriously for the first time. What I was supposed to be doing in retirement was finally coming into focus.
An important decision
My 80-year-old eyes had long since developed cataracts and I became increasingly concerned that I couldn’t judge the colors of my images correctly (or pass my next driver’s license eye test). I had a lens replacement operation on both eyes. What a difference that made! I should have had it done years before, but better late than never.
Recent developments
Since my eye operation, the art professor/artist and I had four of our works selected for a curated show at the Primo Piano Living Gallery in Lecce, Italy. Meanwhile, I‘ve developed an app that makes it easy for me to create a wide variety of abstract images. Here’s one example:
The app was selected for presentation at the EVA London computer arts conference in July 2023. So far that’s the crowning achievement of my late-in-life artistic career.
