Ready For Takeoff, Howard Monoplane Print

I was born in 1940 and grew up in Brooklyn. I studied at Cooper Union in NYC, Skowhegan in Maine and got an MFA at San Francisco Art Institute in 1964. I won a Fulbright Fellowship and lived in Crakow, Poland for a year. I taught painting at the SFAI from 1965 to 1966. I have also been a professional musician since I was 15 and in March of 1966 I joined the rock and roll band Big Brother & The Holding Co. From then until 1979 I played music, recorded and toured all over the world with many different musical artists. In 1979 I returned to visual art, mostly printmaking but since then I have worked in many different media. For the last 42 years my work has evolved and that evolution has moved through different styles, media and directions: abstraction, realism, illusionism geometry, pop imagery, found objects, mixed media, etc. I consider myself lucky to have had the freedom to explore and have not felt the need or the desire to establish a mono-fixation or the commercial pressure to repeat myself; yet it is apparent that through all the changes what I have created and continue to create is informed by a particular sensibility, a feeling for rhythm and a way of seeing the world. In the past few years I have found myself wanting my art to tell a story and to see the elements of my work in a more metaphorical way. Meaning and content have become more important and have taken precedent over purely abstract/aesthetic concerns. I have no contract with dogma or some unwavering, singular idea of what art should be or look like. I try to stay open to the possibility that inspiration can come from anywhere and anything can be made into art. Dave Getz