This is one of my oldest canvases, and one of my mother's absolute favorite canvases. It had hung in her house, in her kitchen since it was done, and until my dad sold his house and moved to Cooperstown. My mom died the same day as the Haitian Earthquake on January 12th, 2010 and was a great artist. She had plenty of beautiful artworks of her own, and enough to fill a house, but always hung mine up all over her walls too. She always worried about me becoming an artist though, and wished I had become a doctor. She was actually the one that helped me most to become an artist. During the last recession, when art jobs were scarce, I actually sold medical Life Support Equipment and Medical Software - Patient Records Reporting Systems to doctors and hospitals, so I came pretty close.

The Lamp Post was finished in 1982, when I climbed into an old empty fountain in downtown Southampton on Long Island, NY.

At this period of time, I was so excited about being an artist and had recently started painting outside (plein Air) like the artist heroes I had looked to from the previous century.

I lived in East Northport, on Long Island and painted beaches in Northport, or drove out farther to the Hamptons with all my art supplies. On several occasions I went out to the Hamptons to paint.

Working in Manhattan was really wonderful. I commuted by train each way to the city and loved going to the major art museums in NYC and to all the many galleries around town.

I found that I really loved Post Impressionism, but wanted to also invent something really modern and original. I thought that some of the ideas from the previous century were just as relevant. This was some of the factors that contributed to how I came up with the idea to paint again with "Dots" in late 1981.

I also especially like the fine detail work, and my art slowly over time has become extremely detailed on inspection up close, however the "Lamp Post" has a certain looseness and freedom of brushstrokes that makes it truly wonderful and ahead (or behind) it's time.

I actually painted this painting just before applying to NYU for my Masters Degree in Studio Art. At this same time, I was working for a national magazine and was running a darkroom. Black and white images had to be screened, which meant a fine screen of dots had to be placed over black & white images so they would reproduce. Xerox Machines (copiers) could only do black or white, the photo mode had not even yet been developed.

In the next room from my office was the color department room. There was a nice man named Ben, and later Otto who showed me how things worked and how the colors were printed on the magazine paper in tiny little microscopic "dots" of color. Modern desktop computers with "Dots Per Inch" (DPI ) resolution screens were not even in use yet then, or the Dot or Ink jet printer and the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screen at that time was run by giant main frame systems. There was just a green screen with simple type, in code.

When I found this interesting and beautiful "Lamp Post" in the middle of the Southampton Town Park, and located on the other side of the street from the Parrish Art Museum, I had already come up with the idea of painting with the "Dots". I met Roy Lichtenstein, the "Pop" Artist around that time at that museum, and on two separate occasions! He also had used dots in his paintings as comics were also screened, so they would reproduce in the newspapers of his day. I had admired Roy's Pop Art since going to art school in 1979 for my Bachelors degree in Fine Art. He actually sometime later mailed me two of his best postcards and signed them to me wishing me good luck in my art career. "The Lamp Post" is 34" x 42" and is framed.