Love, sex, and death had always been the subjects that interested me. Some friends speculated that it was my obsession with death that called three men to attack me while I slept in my bed one night. A fight ensued with a .357 revolver, a Nazi bayonet, and a lead pipe. My loft was left in shambles, I was clubbed on the head, my blood was spattered everywhere. I ended up bound and gagged, left unconscious in a pool of blood in the middle of my studio floor. After that, I was overtaken by internal images of violence and death. I was plagued by recurring memories of the assault. By some strange coincidence, Lisa Sliwa took this photo of me some months before the incident, passed-out after a night of painting on almost the exact same spot where I had been left bound and gagged. Less than a year after the beating, I was shot while standing at the table in the background of the photo.

I continued to paint with Avant, but I needed a deeper form of expression to exorcise the violence that had infected my body like a pestilence. This was a period of deep introspection for me. I made a lot of self-portraits during this period. In private paintings I've never shown, I invented three metaphors for death.

The first metaphor was of death as an invisible escort. "Unseen Escort" shows an old man oblivious to his companion, Death, who holds him by the arm and watches with an enormous eye. A second metaphor for death was clenched teeth. I've always found it curious the way this painting rises over my head like a tombstone in the photo above--where I'm passed out on the floor.

In this strange self-portrait called "X-Ray," I painted clenched teeth exactly in the spot on my chest where, shortly thereafter, I was shot. The shooting, like my clubbing, appeared out of the darkness. I was standing at my kitchen table talking on the phone when I heard an explosion that sounded like a gunshot. I looked up and saw smoke at a partially opened window. I looked down and saw blood on my shirt.

That's a bad place to be bleeding, I told myself when I saw the blood stain expanding in the center of my chest. "I gotta go, I've just been shot," I told the woman I was talking with. I wanted to get out of the line of fire as fast as possible so I didn't even bother to hang up. I ran downstairs and across the street to the same fire station to which I had hopped when I had been bound and gagged.

The third metaphor for death was a paintbrush loaded with paint. While I was recuperating in Bellevue hospital, a detective came in my room, dramatically unfurled this painting at the foot of my bed, and announced I was under arrest for falsifying homicide, in other words, attempting to disguise my suicide as a homicide.

That detective and 40 others were later fired in the largest firing in the history of bungled cases in the New York City Police. Eventually an investigator discovered that seven victims, all shot within a block of Penn Station, were shot by the same gun apparently fired by a still unknown assailant, dubbed the Penn Station Sniper.

The Advice of a Spider

We all have pivotal moments in our lives where we have to decide to go one way or another. It may be impossible for us to balance all the variables and predict the outcome of our choice. Such a moment came for me after I was shot. The shooting was the second brush with death in less than a year. It seemed like maybe I should leave New York, but I had a great studio and an expanding career. The blast partially paralyzed my right arm. It left me emotionally confused. My father sensed my condition and offered to send me to his cabin in the Wisconsin woods for a couple weeks to recuperate my balance. While there he asked if I would paint the log siding with preservative.

There were a lot of spiders residing on the logs. With one hand I brushed them off the logs and with the other I painted on the preservative. One spider clung to his spot when I first tried to brush him away. I swiped at him again. Again he clung to his spot. The momentum of my painting hand was too great to stop, and I plastered him with the loaded paintbrush. Immediately I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I gasped for breath. I realized almost instantly what had happened.

The spider had given up his life to show me how I was. Like the spider I was clinging to my spot in New York. Like the spider I'd had two close brushes, two suggestions I leave my space. And the loaded paintbrush, my very own metaphor of death, was coming. I had to leave New York. I never made the decision. I followed instructions. The world is always talking to us. We must be quiet and open enough to hear its voice. Any time I am presented with a choice and I don't know which to chose, I wait for a sign. One always appears.


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