Art..The Hamptons

My years in the Hamptons from 1989 to 1993 and beyond were possibly the most significant adult adventure in my life to date. They were my REAL art schooling. I had dropped out of RISD in 1983. I lived with my mom, did est, moved to NoVa with her and was really desperate to get out on my own. I joined the Coast Guard in 1987 and eventually got stationed on dry land in East Moriches Long Island. They gave me a small house in Flanders for a short while and in my mind I fancied myself as Jackson Pollock or Wilhem de Kooning doing these hopelessly amateur slap dash pieces that were derivative of my pedestrian understanding of Larry Rivers, Basquiat, Richard Prince..jeez you name it. Things didn't get rolling until I met a girl, Miranda Gatewood, a photographer who lived in Sag Harbor. She was terrific. She introduced me to Joey Weyand who ran a gallery in So Hampton called "Arts 1" his ambition was to meet Henry Geldzahler and become famous. That's the way it was in the Hamptons. It was so easy to meet power people, you thought that sooner or later they would just get you "in". Joey introduced me to Michael Knigin and so on..I started to connect with the artistic community in the East End..Ruth Vered Gallery, Rene Fotouhi, John Chamberlain, Robert Dash, Ross Bleckner, Larry Rivers etc. My dream to this day is to make it to that level of beingness..the floating cultural elite..I always tried to "think" my way in..reading Sartre "Search for a Method", Scientology books and tapes, Penguin classics..always trying to "decode" access..I felt like the answer was right in front of me but I wasn't seeing the "pattern"...my ticket to the salt box studio in
Sagaponack.