Robert

My drawings are my little films, plays, and novels, passports into an idealized world, a place where flaws are minimized and assets maximized. As a child I lived entirely in my fantasies, spending what little money I could come by on magazines and movies, trying to visualize myself as part of the swanky milieus portrayed in the photographs and films. I drew constantly and furtively, attempting to capture my naive and rather demented visions of fashion and high society on paper. When I transfered from a strict French-speaking, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, parochial school to a much larger public high school, where I was a complete alien, it occured to me that my skill might be of value. Maybe I could put all those years of drawing secretly, locked in my room, to distinguish myself from the pack and to achieve acceptance and, maybe, even some mild form of popularity. I volunteered for anything that involved art - prom commitees, the school newspaper, yearbooks - anything. And it worked. It gave me direction and eventually an escape hatch from the dreariness of my remote Maine hometown. In my senior year I started to panic. My family couldn't afford college and the thought of a life spent working in the local textile factory terrified me. I had to invent a way out.I started writing letters and sending drawings to art schools and colleges explaining that I needed financial assistance and before long replies with scholarship offers started arriving. I accepted the Museum School at Boston University before ever telling my parents what I had done. I was fifteen. I was very serious about school for the next two years, but sitting for hours every day enduring the classical discipline of drawing human appendages from plaster casts wasn't enough for me. Impatient, ambitious, and stubborn, there was no holding me back. I started taking my makeshift little portfolio around to the smart shops in Boston's Back Bay and almost immediately free-lance jobs started coming my way. That was the first money I ever earned and to this day drawing has remained my only source of income. Never anything else - waiter, usher, clerk, baby sitter - NOTHING. Still I was restless, unsettled. I craved excitement. Fashion! NEW YORK!!! And for the next two decades, I had it all - drawing at the Haute Couture collections in Paris and Rome for three American newspapers, runway shows in New York, Milan and Los Angeles, working with great designers from Chanel to Zoran, celebrity portrait comissions, prestigious cosmetic clients, glittering parties, Studio 54 - the best of fashion before it became vaudeville. Still, not enough. I wanted to draw more than dresses and painted faces. I wanted to draw the people under the clothes and I wanted to draw men. MEN. No one was interessted. Why would I want to change what I was doing when I was successful at it?One day it dawned on me that gay publications might care - and they did. Torso, Mandate, Manshots, Stallion, Honcho, Playguy, The Advocate started publishing my illustrations regularly and, almost sub-conciously my "Man" began to emerge. The man I would draw again and again through many incarnations - student, clone, biker, business man, gym rat, model, leather daddy, top, bottom, hyper-masculine or dangerouly androgynous - but always "HIM". In the mid-seventies, a friend who was starting a weekly gay entertainment guide asked me if I'd write cabaret reviews for his magazine. Without a second thought I declined. He was very surprised and wondered if there was anything I might consider doing. "Who are these people who make porn movies?" I asked and two weeks later he phoned and told me that Joe Gage, then a radical young pornographer, was coming to town to promote his latest film (yes, this was pre-video) and would I like to interview him. I did, Gage turned out to be a powerhouse, and that began my odyssey through porn, drawing and interviewing every major star who has since unzipped for the camera. This body of work, spanning four decades became, in 2003, my "GODS OF EROTICA" exhibition which broke all attendance records at the venerable Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York's Soho. Negotiations are currently underway to bring the show to other cities in America, Canada, Europe and Asia. Today I have choices, there's enough demand for my work to allow me the luxury of choosing what I want to work on. I package CD's, design an occasional Broadway show poster, draw a little fashion when I need a trend fix, accept a society portrait when I'm feeling social. I'm a fortunate man. Every day when I sit down at my drawing table I'm as excited as I was the very first time all those years ago and every day when it's time to stop I wish I could do more. And more! AND MORE!!! I edited my profile with Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4