In the formative years I was fortunate to collaborate with my great friend Scott Gladden. Scott and I have similar interests, temperament and artistic sensibilities. Scott has an easy and natural bias toward creating that I've always admired. Every day we would sit and draw, listening to loud music, dutifully consuming the plentiful variety of substances on hand that were used as a call to inspiration.
We learned silk screening from our high school art teacher Ilona Rymer. She would divide school printing needs between us, Scott did some and I did others. But most our time, definitely our creative time, was spent in his room making art.
We made a lot of silk screens together. All of them were hand cut from our own drawings, often sitting knee to knee with a common drawing board across our laps, busily carving away at the lacquer film. His portion was often carved out upside down and I was amazed he could draw expressive parts like hair and fabric with a knife.
During the printing process he would experiment with different colors of paint on the same stencil, and coming back to hand detail parts of the screen with his finger. He has always been fearless in his approach to everything and gave me confidence to go way passed my perceived limits (in many aspects of life).
There are few survivors from this period of work from 1970 ~ 72; what I could find is represented here. The earliest dated one is Jimi (in front of the amp) from ’71, but they are all from the same basic time and each of us had a hand in each one.
Below is a charcoal picture of Scott and me at the card table in ’72 or 3. Musicians Ken Rhoads and Mike Rafnel, artist Bill Jacobi and producer Mark Ferree had rented a house at 1208 E. Commonwealth that became (among other things) a poker palace. I imagine Bruce Beckman took the photo, but it could have been Joey Viles, both had cameras on hand at Rhoads house regularly. The drawing was done in ’73 and I probably lost the hand.
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