A Life in Art
A Brief Autobiography
I grew up in a house in which the walls were covered with paintings, drawings, and Japanese prints. My uncle Sacha Moldovan was a Russian expressionist painter who had lived in Paris in the Twenties and been friends with Soutine and Matisse. Art has been in my blood all my life. I was a Museum of Modern Art regular from infancy.
In 1970 I enrolled at New York University in the Bronx, but by 1972 I had transferred to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I focused on etching, drawing and painting. Eventually I found my mentor in Jan Cox, a member of the COBRA school, who was nurturing and supportive of my angry, figurative work.
When Jan returned home to Antwerp, the Museum School granted me a coveted Independent Study Award, and I followed for thirteen months in 1975 and 1976. The art I produced during this sojourn was my first true body of work. The paintings were of stark, labyrinthine plazas populated by solitary figures with body parts hacked off – those parts often lying on the ground nearby, still bleeding. In retrospect, this work reflected my unutterable sense of alienation and isolation.
In 1976 I moved back to New York, to a loft on Broome Street. I quickly joined the Downtown Scene: painting and stumbling through the Mudd Club and other artists’ bars. During this period I befriended Frank Marino and began exhibiting work in his Soho gallery. I also showed in the East Village at the Nico Smith Gallery.
By 1980, I was living in Hell’s Kitchen. I created a large body of work entitled Views from a Yellow Cab, comprising watercolors painted while driving, as well as gouaches and oils. I picked up the well-known art critic Cookie Mueller from a nightclub, she was fascinated by my simultaneous painting and driving, and I was featured in one of her Details magazine articles.
I left for France in April of 1984. I spent a month in Nice. I was enraptured by Provence, transported by the light and joie de vivre. Leaving Nice, I moved to Paris where I lived in the Marais. The paintings from this four-month sojourn in France have a lightness of spirit rare in my early work.
I returned to New York in September 1984, and moved into a large, raw loft at the very end of Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I resumed work on Views from a Yellow Cab. I also created paintings of a variety of other subjects including still life. Not long after that I stopped painting…for more than ten years.
In 1998 I started painting again. I had no studio, so for the next five years I painted exclusively en plein air. I found myself drawn to paint exuberant landscapes. I started selling direct to individual collectors and corporations, including Pfizer Corporation and Kirkland & Ellis.
In 2003 I moved into the first of three studios that I’ve occupied at 68 Jay Street in DUMBO. Currently, the view from my window is delicious: my most recent paintings are of urban scenes. I find myself interested in the shadow again; although now in a way which is integrated with a joyful acceptance of all that life has to offer. These new urban paintings are a glimmer of a new direction in my work; I am excited to see where this journey leads me.