Why Wood?

When I started creating paintings and collages to sell, I was making them all flat, and that was fun, but then I discovered the beauty of working on wood - thanks to my pal Leo Charre. Leo and I were living in a warehouse in Stuarts Draft, Virginia, when he asked me to get some wood for him to paint on. I remember I got the wood and brought it back to the warehouse, but he wasn’t there. We were getting ready for a show I was about to print a bunch of posters and instead I impulsively printed them on that wood. I loved the surface and the texture; it had so much more personality than paper and it was easy to obtain. I got really excited about it. At the time, there weren’t a lot of commercial artists doing silkscreen for art, except maybe Shepard Fairey. Most of my peers weren’t into making art, specifically to sell anyway. Now everyone and his brother do that stuff. But at the time, it was a new medium for me. I stopped working on paper and for six months only worked on wood. I developed a relationship with it and started to realize fully the potential of wood as a great medium.