So for this artist’s bio, I thought I would try out this puncto idea. I have found that the best way to deal with questions about my work is to be enigmatic. So this is a practice run. I’ll show you some jpegs and you tell me whether this puncto idea works.

Jpeg 1. Big surprise. Not a painting - actually an old b/w photo of me and my sister which I almost threw out before I realised - it’s a puncto! I’m about 7 or 8. She’s a year younger, the one crying. Its the front yard of our house. I know, we look like two lost dots. That’s the way they took pictures in those days. They tried to get everything in the shot. Notice the pale little flowers pinned to our pale little coats. Pictures were only for special occasions. So we had to be going to a party, or to a funeral. But take a look at that white shape - there on the third step of the stoop, painted on a black rectangle. The short serif, the flat line, the sweeping curved downstroke, a 7 ….for 714 Lexington Ave. Now I’ll show you what it is about those numbers.

Click Jpeg 2 Mmmm. Upside down. Doesn't matter. Still works. Now do you see the resemblance? All these years I thought I was painting the interplay of constellations. But … in one painting after another Click…Click…Click… They're not the white trails of galaxies on the black cosmos. No, they're just numbers, the same white numbers on black over and over again. Maybe a curley cue is different here and there. But those numbers on that stoop, that 7, that 1, that 4 are already what my paintings will be. Isn't that so puncto?

But there’s punctos all over this photo. Look at what’s behind me and my sister. It’s the side wall of the corner bar and grill. You know I used to think they were called bar and grills because they had bars and grills on their windows.

There was this kid Freddie who lived above it. He had a withered arm. It hung from his shoulder like the twisted arm of a doll. But my sister said he was great for shoplifting. People would look sadly at him and his withered arm . And they’d never notice her stuffing half the store down her pants. After that Freddie and my sister got into breaking and entering , this and that, but that has nothing to do with anything.

What’s important is … Zoom…a close-up … see that little bucket which just happened to get into the shot. That little bucket my sister and I kept filled with tiny pieces of linoleum we’d tear from the kitchen floor. Ammunition for the wood rubber-band gun I invented. No on would know what hit them until the blood started running down their faces. And that’s the goddamn puncto. Click, look at these painting. The reds. The blues, yellows, the sickly green, the thirties white. They are the colours of those old pieces of linoleum. Colours. My weapons.

Zoom Another closeup. Now look at the area on my sister’s right. What? No, I don’t know why she is crying. Maybe it was the hat. Every time we went out, they made us wear these scratchy hats which gripped our heads like steel pincers. I must have pulled mine off. I’m sure I had one. They always dressed us alike. Okay, but let’s get back. Look at the rhythm of the windows. The cellar window, a small elegant square, then the golden rectangle of the first floor window. That? ….the thing hanging in the first floor window? That’s a some kind of scapula of the virgin mary. Would you believe it - my mother,my father, my grandmother, my 8 brothers and sisters lived all jammed together on the first floor behind the virgin mary. You didn’t know I had so many? I know. I don’t talk to any of them. Once was enough.

Click. But look at the sizes of my canvases. They are the exact ratios of those windows. 10 x 10 Click; 5 by 7, Click, 16 by 24 Puncto – the unintended significance of… What? Well we all lived on one floor because we had a boarder who lived on the top floor . She had like 4 kids. I remember once coming home from school, and there she was holding her brand new baby out the window, like… like Rapunzel about to throw down her hair. And she is yellling to her new boyfriend, “Johnny, Johnny, you better get your ass back here, Johnny, or I swear I’m fuckin’ letting go.” But Big Johnny who hung out at the bar and grill, maybe even owned it, just got into his big black caddy and va va roomed. Click

Okay ... the last puncto in this photo - a closeup of the pale little flowers stuck to our pale little coats. Just above where my sister’s hand is clutching me? Here I’ll go back to the bigger photo Click . See how she’s leaning into me, her face filled with tears, her hand grabbing my coat, pulling, pulling. As if asking for something, as if wanting something. From me. Of all people. From me. But me. I always stared right past her, right past all of them, really.

Click back to the closeup. At first I thought the puncto was the long needle buried in the flowers holding them to the coat. No. Click Look at my recent landscapes. Amazing isn’t it. Click. Look at the actual pattern of the shadows. Click. Click Click. The pattern of shadows are exactly the same as falling from the petals from so long ago. Click Click Its as if I have been haunted by this photo from the day it was taken, even though its been decades since I laid eyes on it. Decades. So many years ago, I can’t even remember, I stepped out of that house, strolled out of that front yard, and and out of their lives forever.

My sister? That one ? She always came back. Even when my parents threw her out of the house. She came back. Even when they barred the door, and called the police, and told her they couldn’t take it anymore . She’d come back. She’d disappear. But then she’d come back. She’d always come back. One night she broke in through the cellar window. The next day, my mother found her, dead on the dusty floor, matches, cigarettes, a needle still stuck in her thin, brown arm. Hey, wait a minute. I never noticed this before. Her hand. Where she grabs my coat. What are they? . 1…2…3. Three of them. I wonder…could they be tears. Yes, yes they are tears. They must have fallen from her cheek to the back of her hand. No wait, there was a fourth tear. You can still see the its trail where it slid away. Away from her. Slid away. Slid out of sight. Perhaps… it has already landed on my coat. Click.