Recent Post: PUBLIC INVASION PUBLICINVASION sipped the coffee and studied the woman sitting nude on the stairway. The contrast of the straight lines of the stair and the soft, rounded curves of her body would capture one・s eye, I thought, but something wasn・t right. No, the silver streaks in her hair were fine, and the various shadows on her body were projected correctly. I couldn・t find a technical reason for my unease, but it was there; she didn・t seem to be alive, and that fact ruined the painting. I wished Debra were here; she would have known. If I had learned one thing from her, it was how to critique artwork, and she taught me to be especially tough on my own.
In September of 1964, I started my senior year of high school in the small community of Gallatin, Tennessee. I had waited since first grade for this year, because at the end of the school term, I would be free to start the life I wanted rather than that held in esteem by the parents, teachers, and other students of the town. My difficulty was that I didn・t fit into the proper suit of sports, hunting, and fishing that clothed every other boy. I had always been small for my age, and even as a new senior, I weighed only about a hundred pounds. Even if I had been interested, my size eliminated football as anything other than a suicide sport. I wasn・t tall enough for basketball, was too slow for track, and could never bring myself to kill anything. I was also a year older than all of the students in my class; a bout with scarlet fever had cost me the penalty of repeating third grade. Of course, the repetition of a grade had branded me as stupid. I had discovered girls, but since I didn・t drip testosterone from every pore, the word had been passed that I must be gay, and so even at the ripe old age of nineteen, I had not had even a single date. After a couple of years of fights and the resultant black eyes and punishment of an hour・s detention for each incident, I just withdrew from nearly everything and everyone at school. I had one passion in my short life; I loved to draw and paint, and I lived for the day that I could pursue art as my vocation.
