Teenage Art

Just when I think I’ve gone through all the old junk that used to be in my parents’ basement, something else turns up.  Here you have some very early Tofus.  I did these when I was about 17.   It is from a time when I actually was a vegetarian, though I wasn’t called Tofu yet.  My first foray into linoleum block prints was earlier, I was about seven and taking museum classes at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo.  Oh, for art teachers they were pretty uptight.  They worried that I used such a big piece of linoleum.  Then I discovered that just using the ink roller to apply printing ink directly onto the paper in abstract patterns was much more interesting.  They had a small freak out, but what did they expect when I had been visiting that museum for as long as I could remember, blame Robert Motherwell. 

So here we have a humpback whale, a blue crab (in blue) and, for some reason, a giant shrimp above a landscape – I have no idea why.