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Ode to Rita Deanin Abbey — Fledgling Adult pg93
Colorful companion to my memoir The Incompetent Psychic
By February I was still free floating between beds and couches as I lacked an apartment. My sales job at the ski shop could support a place to live or substances, but not both. My mother’s patience was finally wearing threadbare from the whirlwind of mess I would randomly show up to create, then leave behind. I tended to see a pile of clothes as the subject for a still life drawing rather than the inconvenience to others it really was. It was time to move on. — From Chapter 4
It is easy to tell this is an early drawing as I sucked at rendering the folds of fabric. Had I studied for a degree in a real art school that might have been different, but I did my four years at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (with one weird semester at U of NV, Reno). I was trained in the slipshod Paint What You Feel curriculum where representation was poo-poo’d as an regressive anachronism instead of a stepping stone to mastery.
The one exception (and exceptional) professor was Rita Deanin Abbey — a modern classicist who didn’t believe in shortcuts to mastery of form and color. Ms. Abbey’s influence was the Expressionistic Colorism movement, and she had studied with Sigmund Menkes in New York. Influenced by her training at the Hans Hofmann…
