11/17/0
In the year 2000, the band “Thisway” appeared in my Woodstock gallery. Reprise Records had them in town to promote their first CD and my good friends at radio station WDST steered them to my establishment, where they filmed a lot of fluorescent art gallery fun for their video. My sad recollection is that they sold about 430,000 of those CDs, but 450.000 was the magic number of sales needed to get their video on MTV, which probably would have made my art gallery famous.
For the group’s second album, the record company had them go fashionably emo, probably because the lead singer had that Richard Gere look, but the second album sold less well than the first. The next time I saw them, they were back to rockin’ out like Zeppelin; they were on top of the world, they all had new instruments and rich girlfriends and the producer from Coldplay had been hired to do the third album. I did two versions of the album cover, but before they could even pay me, there was a major corporate shake-up at Reprise. They dropped 60% of their artists, including Thisway, and the band broke up. So I’ve been using those album covers as locational indicators ever since Thisway went that way.
2/26/1
My invention of psychedelic sand paintings started with group juggling fluorescent balls at the art gallery. Little fluorescent paint chips would fall off the juggling balls onto the floor, which gradually accumulated enough paint chips to be transformed into a tableau of a million shining stars under the feet of the visitors. On rainy nights the paint chips would stick to the bottoms of their shoes long enough to leave fluorescent footprints as they left the gallery. When the show finished, I swept the paint chips off the floor and took them home to make art. Soon I was manufacturing various sized paint chips to assemble into three dimensional psychedelic paintings. The Tibetan Buddhists and the Navajo Indians have been making sand paintings for thousands of years and their art just blows away. My sand paintings blow the camera away as the lens is overwhelmed by the bright glowing paint.