Thank you. I'm happy to be here representing my painting, Le Voyage, which I am very proud to have associated with MBA.

This is not my first time to address the faculty and student body. About 50 years ago Headmaster, Dr. R. L. Sager asked 4 boys to address the assembly. Someone had kidnapped the Hillsboro mascot burro before that school’s Homecoming game against MBA. The burro was released center field as an unscheduled half-time event. Dr. Sager said someone had added insult to injury, the injury being the fact that MBA won the game 66 to 6. Someone needed to apologize.

I'm happy to be back as a less nefarious citizen of our campus.

And now a few words about the canvas: From the south of Africa, mankind has migrated to the rest of this sphere. The walking man, to me, symbolizes that spirit in human beings that makes us want to seek what lies over the blue mountains and beyond the horizon of the sea. It is the same spirit that today builds businesses, makes art, and competes in the Olympics: a spirit that inspires imagination and courage and persistence.

As an artist, I have attempted in a universal way, to capture the curiosity and the fortitude of mankind through an iconic walking figure, one that can take us into locales, experiences, and more importantly, ideas. The walking figure is a symbol for the core spirit of what it is like to be human.

The Walking man is a long recurring theme for me... exhibited in my first one-man exhibition in Paris in 1989 and recently in exhibitions in Scottsdale, Arizona and here in Nashville at Zeitgeist Gallery.

OK, you have my interpretation of the painting. Now, what would please me the most as an artist, is knowing that you have different ideas about the work. It would mean that the image resonated in a universal way and was receptive to housing some great or small part of you.

In general, my paintings are a personal journal of my life. The wave is therefore both serious and frivolous, joyous and melancholic, spiritual, and erotic. The continuity is in the fact that it tracks a real life.

Speaking of real lives... and forgive me if this sounds like an ad, but it is sincere and deeply felt.... MBA is helping to build real lives every day by nurturing those human qualities that propel the foundations of knowledge into action and product and dream realized.
The gentleman, the scholar, the athlete. The walking man in progress.