Study for 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' Painting

My family and I immigrated to the United States from Sicily when I was five years old. We lived in New Jersey, and in my teens, Narragansett, Rhode Island, where I completed high school. After graduating from Indiana University, I became a one-person art department at Washington and Jefferson College, expanding the art program and faculty in my three years there. In 1966, I joined the Michigan State University faculty and taught graduate and undergraduate painting as a full time professor. Twenty years later, in 1986, I left MSU for New York City where I now live and work. to concentrate on a career in New York, where I now live and work. During my first years there, I supplemented my income from art sales teaching classes at the School of Visual Arts. My early three dimensional work consists of gestural shapes, each cut from wood, and attached directly to the wall, similar to low relief. The work now extends further from the wall, is more linear, resembling line drawing if made 3D. What I am presenting here in addition to the larger paintings are the sketches and studies that I create in the process of developing a 3D work.