AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was born on January 3, 1947, in Baptist Hospital, New Orleans. A couple of years shuffling back & forth between St. Rose and Destrehan (upriver from New Orleans) and we moved to Baton Rouge. My father became a chemist, my mother sang gravelly barroom songs, and I wandered the lake banks catching turtles for a living—until I was sentenced to twelve years of misery in Catholic and public schools. There was redemption in college. I attended LSU. It was big and amusing and I could hide in large gangs of really interesting people. I failed in: pre-med, pre-law, Sigma Chi, dating girls. I succeeded in: playing pinball, starting a band and making money playing frat parties (Sigma Chi included), convincing my parents that the only way I would get out of university would be with a degree in painting (my soul is napalmed on the levee making my first painting with some art students who hung around the band). I enrolled in the Department of Art and I was awakened. I learned so much about painting from so many remarkable artists* who spent a lot of time and energy on me, both at LSU and at Queens College (CUNY) where I received my MFA in 1970.
*Edward Pramuk, John Hazard Wildman, John Botkin, Paul Georges, Jack Wilkinson, John Ferren, Libby Tannenbaum, James Brooks, Charles Cajori, Robert Pincus-Witten

I was tenderly cajoled into the arts at a very early age by my paternal grandmother, Bernice Lowe Crespo, a postmaster who bought me my first guitar; and Elvis who liberated me from the constructs of my parents and my schools. And there was the large manifestation of my maternal grandmother, Mary Hammond Buford, a high school literature teacher. I spent a lot of my youth with her and her passions. I can still hear her reading Papa Hemingway to me: Nick Adams stories, novels and poems. She worshiped him at an altar of his books, in a scrapbook she kept of his global escapades as reported in magazines both literary and scandalous, and with the famous 1951 Life Magazine cover, which was framed on her living room wall. I the child thought he was a member of the family. She showed me books in which paintings by Cezanne, Van Gogh and Delacroix were spoken to me in her odd stories of colors and objects. She taught me to cook. She made me read and write. She inspired freedom and whimsy. It was her, and her phantom lover Papa, together in a dream coldly awake and alive, who led me to Venice, where I found them drinking prosecco with Palladio next to the Redentore. They sent me packing to the Accademia and the Scuola San Rocco and a colossus of painting that I am still trying to mount.

I am living & painting & teaching in Baton Rouge, immensely enjoying life with my wife, the painter Libby Johnson, and our two dogs, Rose & Lucca.