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After being a psychoanalyst for 30 years, writing novels and plays, and being Creative Literary Editor of Psychoanalytic Perspectives for 17 of those years, I have found inside of me a new place I have grown to love—being a painter.
Eight summers ago, on Long Island, I began taking classes at The Art Barge in Amagansett. It was conceived as a teaching studio in 1960 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a venue for people to paint and nurture their creative life. The museum purchased a surplus WW I munitions barge for $1, overhauled it, and had it towed to Napeague Bay, where it is now permanently moored—close to the sky, the sea, and the salt.
One gorgeous day in July, I climbed the steps of this weather-beaten vessel for the first time. Inside, I found a large sunny room, filled with dozens of easels, tin cans, tubes of acrylics and oils, and colorful canvases. Here I began to paint—discovering a totally new creative process, bathed in the same brilliant light that inspired Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and many other East End luminaries.
The instructor of he class, George Negroponte, was enormously talented and a very generous teacher. He grew up around painting. His mother was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his father a serious “Sunday” painter. An accomplished painter himself, George had studied at Yale and served as Director of The Drawing Center in SoHo for many years. His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums around the world. He validated my unconscious way of working and helped me find my creative painterly center.
While most students painted on easels inside the studio, I gravitated to the fresh ocean air, direct sunlight, and salty wooden planks of the deck. Several times a week, I would place an 11 × 14 canvas on an easel, grab some tubes of acrylic and some 2-inch-wide brushes—and begin to enter another, un-worded domain of pure emotion. It was my private place.