Before I painted I did cartoons inspired from childhood influences such as comics, caricatures, and satirical stuff like political cartoonists, Mad Magazine, and underground artists like Shelton and Crumb. So when I moved on in my teens to learning about painters, especially turn of the century French painters, Lautrec was incredibly magnetic. Full size torso on stunted legs, he carried a hollow cane filled with absinthe. A parade of continentals behaving badly, a spontaneous sense of composition that caught life on the fly, chaotic compositions, like the dancer's leg thrust into an aristocrat's beak. I've seen many paintings of his but this exhibit at the Phillips was the first time to face the actual posters, and they are much, much larger and more varied than I realized. I saw stages of his prints, not something I've seen before. Cheret, Mucha, and Lautrec helped fuel l'affichomanie at the turn of the century, but its power endured. Mucha's art nouveau Job cigarette paper ads were newly popular when poster-mania overtook me in my teens in the hippie shops and music outlets, and I decorated my ceiling with posters of all types, heavily leaning on black light op-art and vintage movie stills. Once while I was away, my parents let an elderly friend from Memphis sleep in my bedroom. The next morning she said, "I felt so secure with Winston Churchill looking down at me all night" (it was WC Fields).
In 1977-78, I went to France to paint and on my return I placed in a cargo container a year's worth of paintings removed from stretchers and drawings encased in a series of jumbo concert posters yanked off the walls of Aix, London, and Paris.
