Art school made me hate art for about 10 years.

I loved the life experience of my four years at Parsons in Paris, a small building at La Motte Picquet with about 150 students, all departments and years combined, along with the NYU Experimental Theatre Wing.

My family were largely not interested in art post Picasso and while they encouraged my drawing as a kid, a career in art was unthinkable, even if drawing was all I was interested in or good at through high school.

I went to Parsons as an illustration major on a work study scholarship, having grown up obsessed with the post-Zap French comic scene of Moebius, Bilal and Metal Hurlant, with a desire to make adult, real life comic books (what would later be called graphic novels).

I can see now that my lack of childhood art exposure had left me rather provincial in terms of art-speak and contemporary art references compared to some of the students taking semesters abroad at Parsons Paris from the New York or LA schools.

Working as a janitor mopping studios and cleaning toilets after hours, I took classes with the other art students at day and recorded abstract music in the basement with the theatre students at night and on weekends, getting us all in thanks to my janitor’s keys.

The painting faculty at the time, all men, were entirely neo-Ab-Ex, very much in the church of Beuys, Schnabel, Twombly and Marden with some post ’70s Color Field thrown in.

Using photos was verboten, painting and drawing with sticks encouraged.

No one was interested in comic books.

The illustration department quickly felt very small minded and dusty to me, and I was drawn to the fine art side as the sexier and more opaque section of the school.

There was a certain cultishness around some of these male teachers that I had problems with, and a kind of self-aggrandizing machismo about this way of painting (scavenge the woods for tools! sticks as brushes will reveal truth! claw the texture! expose your darkest depths through chance action!), along with a vocal disdain for anything outside a rigid set of parameters that I tried to adopt but felt completely foreign to.

As time has passed, I’ve become more disappointed with the learning experience and can’t help but wonder how I might have been kickstarted differently if I’d been exposed then to Richter, Close, Salle, Kippenberger, Kruger, Prince, Sherman, Baldessari?

During my final two years I ended up taking extra classes in graphic design and graduated thoroughly disenchanted with illustration and feeling bullied and bitter about art, with a career in design already launched thanks to a wonderful but alcoholic teacher.

It wasn’t until ten years or so later, a Moma visit with an old friend, a Kiki Smith episode of Art 21, and seeing Dana Schutz’s first show Frank from Observation, that I reconnected and began making work again. Thank you, Kiki and Dana.