At the time I went to school there, The Art Academy of Cincinnati was connected to The Cincinnati Art Museum, which is located in Eden Park on top of one of the city’s highest hills.

As we drove into the park we would pass The Conservatory on our left, which is a huge glass structure full of plants. The road would then wind past The Reflector Pool (a fairly large body of shallow water) and then head up a hill passing the Band Shell where they would often have concerts spring through fall. Just past that, we’d take a right, and there we were.

Had we taken a left, we would pass The Playhouse, where they have theater productions. Just beyond that is Mount Adams, which is like Cincinnati’s Greenwich Village. It’s a charming neighborhood, with lots of bars and restaurants. There are numerous overlooks all throughout the area, with wonderful views of Downtown, the Ohio River, and Kentucky.

After I graduated, The Art Academy expanded to a second building in Mount Adams and then, a few years ago, they moved the entire school to a downtown location.

The Art Academy of my time was an ancient stone structure that resembled a castle without the turrets. There were two floors, with marble staircases. The sculpture studio was just inside the front door to the left of the lobby. The offices were straight ahead, and there was a small art supply store just to the right.

The art supply store sold (among other things) Conte a Paris, 4-B – a certain make of compressed charcoal that I find to be magical. I’ve tried so many other brands since, and none come close to what this stuff can do. I’ve always used it with a Pink Pearl eraser. This may seem like a small thing to acknowledge, but I wouldn’t have done the hundreds of cityscape drawings, and thousands of figure drawings that I have over the years (or they certainly would not be of the same quality) had I not found this medium.

It’s kind of hard to come by.

I just find it interesting that our little store carried it.

Beyond the store was the printmaking department, where we would do lithographs using these heavy stones that we would grind down to varying degrees of smoothness before drawing on them.

Further down the hall was the student lounge, which doubled as the school gallery. Further down still was a door that led into the Art Museum where we had access to their library. I spent a lot of time there, mostly checking out the work of contemporaries in New York. 

The painting / figure drawing studios were upstairs. That’s where I spent almost all of my time. Those studios were the stuff of movies - high ceilings with skylights, a stage for the model, and a big philodendron plant in a pot sharing the stage - smooth timeworn cement floors with easels and drawing benches scattered all about.

We worked from models a lot, always for drawing, sometimes for painting. The drawing classes were more crowded, as everyone took drawing. There were only eight or so painters in my class.

There were two camps in the school: the fine artists and the commercial artists. We never really got along with each other. The view of the fine artists was that the commercial artists were only in it for the money. We saw ourselves as being above such crass pursuits. We were in it for the passion. We were all going to end up in NYC where we would become famous for being true to ourselves without compromise.

The school didn’t offer a degree, only a certificate upon graduation. The only non-studio course at The Academy was Art History, and we fine artists rebelled against having to take even that. If you wanted a degree you had to make up the academic classes elsewhere.

I loved the place, and all the characters in it. I felt very at home there, as everyone else was at least as crazy as me.

I loved drawing from models most especially. Everyone else would sit on benches, but I always put my drawing board on the floor, usually right in front of the stage. It was like I bonded with the model.

I have no idea why, but in painting class, everyone always worked large: 5, 6, sometimes 7 or 8 footers. I’ve since thought that this was odd, as had we worked small, we would have been able to cover a lot more ground education-wise.  At that time of your life as a student, you are mostly just moving through ideas and techniques, so you would think that would be the way to go.

But no. I think we wanted to revel in the drama of huge undertakings, as we were going to become hugely significant artists. It was an expression of our wanna-be egos.

I was, by far, the most serious painter in my class. I did more paintings than everyone else combined. I’d paint all day, often into the night, every day. My dad let me use a back room at his business as a studio and sometimes I would work late and spend the night. If I was deeply involved in one of my studio paintings, I wouldn’t even go to school.

During the summer, I would work for my dad, driving the routes for employees when they went on vacation. He had four or five delivery guys.

The downside of this is that, during the school year, if one of his drivers called in sick, my dad would call me at school and ask if I could fill in. He called a lot, but I never complained. If I didn’t do it, he would have to, and that was unthinkable to me.

Every year, once a year, The Art Academy would invite a known artist to come to the school and talk to students. One year, they invited Alfred Leslie. I really wanted to meet him, as I liked his work a lot. He was in his representational phase at the time.

On that day, my dad called. I couldn’t believe it, but I went, and didn’t even tell him about the visiting artist. Luckily, that particular route took me close by the school, so I was able to attend the critique of our work by Alfred. He positively responded to one of my figure paintings in particular. He said it was as good as a Pearlstien, who was another artist I greatly admired.

I was very inspired.

(Many years later, I was in a group show with Phillip Pearlstien in NYC. He came to the opening. It was so much fun to meet and talk to him.)

I won The Painting Scholarship for my junior year.

My painting instructor for my junior and senior years was Stewart. I loved Stewart as the father figure he was, but he was a very uptight, cold and distant dad. He seemed to despise me for my confidence, aggressiveness, and talent. He was always telling me that I would never make it in New York, and that I would only end up driving a cab (as that is what had happened to him). He told me that getting into galleries was all political; that it didn’t matter how good you were; that all that was important is who you know.

The big event upon graduation was which senior was going to win The Wilder Scholarship. This was a traveling scholarship, a rather considerable amount of money that you could spend at will. I remember that my proposal was to use the money to travel around America so as to better understand the country, as I saw myself as being an American artist.

In all modesty, it was a hands-down thing that I would win it. You’d just have to see the amount and quality of all I did, compared to everyone else.

Instead, they gave it to this guy who only did a handful of paintings all year. He used the money to go to Paris. The story goes that when he landed, he freaked out over being there alone, got right back on the next plane and came back. He went on to become a hairdresser.

In the end, I saw it all as being good training, as I have crossed paths with so many Stewarts in my career. For every person who has supported me, it always seems like there are three or four others who are trying to stab me in the back.

********

Chris went to The Art Academy also. We both started at the same time - she as a freshman, me as a sophomore. She was a commercial artist, a designer, and a pretty good one. We always rode back and forth to school together.

My brother Jeff became a student there the following year, so then there were three in the car. Jeff kind of idolized me, and he was very fond of Chris also. Jeff and I shared an upstairs bedroom and one night a week Chris would come over and we would drink frozen Pepsi out of the bottle and watch Perry Mason on TV under the covers in the dark. It was kind of intimate and a lot of fun.

When I was a senior, Chris got a job as a coat-check girl in an up-and-coming restaurant. She was making a hell of a lot of money in tips (at least it seemed so to us at the time) and she started hanging out with the restaurant crowd.

Her tastes in men were changing.

She had an affair with one of her designer friends who happened to be married at the time. His wife called her mom. This was a scandal of unprecedented proportions. This was like one of those soap operas on TV. Even I was excited to be playing a bit part in the drama.

That said, the dye between us had been cast. It was clear that our paths were leading us in different directions. We broke up.

This was a huge thing, especially for our moms, who had always thought that our getting married was a done deal.

It was a pretty big thing for me too. I did the suicidally depressed act - taking long walks in the woods at night, sometimes sitting on the Becksmith’s side fence waiting for Chris’ date to drop her off and kiss her goodnight.

Oh woe is me.

I think I truly was depressed, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I’ve always viewed my life as a movie, and this was an interesting movie. I’ve always had a thing for intensity.

I got a little crazy during that time. It was like I simply didn’t care any more. It wasn’t that I had my heart set on marrying Chris. Truth is, deep down inside, I absolutely knew that I never would, as she was nothing like the kind of person who could resonate with my deepest self - that being my cosmic experiences.

Still, I knew, just knew, that she was as good, far better than, anyone else out there I had met. I mean, our families loved each other. She was indeed a kind and compassionate person, and we had GREAT sex.

Where to go from there?

My answer was to start drinking a lot and throwing myself into short affairs with women who wanted to go to bed with me because I was Tim the artist guy. 

But it was incredibly unsatisfying. It was like eating nothing but potato chips for months on end. I longed for a solid meal, but didn’t know where to find it. 

The school took a trip to NYC in my senior year and Chris briefly got back together with me at that time. I think she just wanted someone to sit with for the long bus ride.

She took a plane home.

********

After graduating, I got a job in a lumber mill. My plan was to work for a year, save all the money, and then quit and paint until the money was gone. During that time I looked for a studio.

I found one – a great one.

My friend Hal and me ended up sharing two entire floors of an old warehouse building in Covington, Kentucky, just across The Suspension Bridge from Downtown Cincinnati. No one had been using the building for something like fifty years, but it was connected to another building that was a clothing factory or something like that. Our rent was $120 a month ($60 each) utilities included.

We restored one entire floor. He had a studio on one side; I had a studio on the other. The middle room we divided into bedrooms and what passed for a kitchen.

We took out one of the toilets, and created a shower.

The upstairs floor we didn’t touch, except for the front of the one room, where we had a couch and a TV. One cool thing about sitting in that room was that when the tug boats pushing barges made a turn in the river a half mile up, the beam of their lights would flash through the room.

We also had access to the roof, which was cool, especially during firework displays.

My studio was unbelievably beautiful. It had huge windows all along two walls, and I filled it with plants. It was like a greenhouse. The plants responded like crazy.

For the entire time we lived there, I don’t think we ever cooked anything aside from eggs and grilled cheese sandwiches. I myself mostly lived on watermelon and peanuts, salted in the shell, that I could buy at a liquor store around the corner. I also started drinking a lot, mostly beer and whiskey.

I don’t think I ever painted in that studio. I spent all my time doing abstract charcoals, which directly related to my cosmic experiences.

I did indeed quit the lumber mill job after one year, and coasted on that money as far as I could. When it was almost all gone, I didn’t want to get another job, as I thought that doing anything other than art was completely insane and a waste of my time.

There was this guy in Cincinnati who was known to be a millionaire. He had taught at Moeller before my time, my older brother was in his class, and rumor was that he taught for free.

I wrote him a letter, telling him of my situation, telling him that I would soon become a famous artist but that I couldn’t afford the time to work a job, and if only he would support me, I would really appreciate it. I told him that I would repay him with paintings once I became successful. I enclosed a sheet of slides of my work.

He called me up three days later and said he would be glad to. He asked me if I would do a painting of his home, and I told him no, that I didn’t paint houses.

He and I just loved this story. He would often come to my shows, many years later, and we just loved to retell it. Recently, he passed away, a few months after his lovely wife. I miss you Roth.

********

Minus the camaraderie of school life, spending all my time alone in huge empty rooms with nothing to keep me company but my own thoughts, having all the cosmic stuff pulsating through my system like blood, I started to go crazy.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think that I could succeed as an artist. I thought that was a given.

It’s just that, the very idea of spending one’s entire life smearing paint on canvas, suddenly started to seem like an incredibly silly thing to do.

To say that I knew that my destiny had more to do with the cosmic stuff, is a gross understatement. The cosmic experience literally was, and was about, everything. Everything else I was doing was like some kind of funny dance in comparison.

Just I didn’t know what it was that I was supposed to do with it.

So one day, I remember it as being a sunny Sunday morning, while walking through a deserted section of Downtown Cincinnati, I stopped on the sidewalk and started screaming.

It was like: “Yo! Motherfucker! I’ve had it with this shit! You tell me what it is that you want me to do, and that is what I will do, but I need some serious answers right now, or I’m checking out.”

And then it was like: “Yo! BAMN!! Motherfucker! What the fuck took you so long?”

It wasn’t like I actually heard a voice, but I did indeed get a tangible response, that more or less knocked me backwards. It was a verification that there really is something out there, and there really was purpose behind what was happening to me. Just I had to start looking for it.

The deal I made with the universe was that I would start actively looking. If I found the answer, then that is what I would do, no matter what it was, provided that I was completely convinced. It had to talk to me, to the person who I exactly was, and make me believe it. I wasn’t going to do anything based on faith.

I took off running.

This was way before I had ever heard of quantum physics. At the time, I was thinking of my experience as being spiritual in nature, so I thought to try religion.

Prophets of old always seemed to do a lot of fasting when looking for answers, so I started doing a lot of that. I also determined to read the Bible from beginning to end.

Aside from that, I started checking out all kinds of religions. By far, the most interesting people I found, were the people who speak in tongues. Have you ever attended a church service at such a place? It’s wild. Those people aren’t faking that shit. They really do get possessed by something or other. I always wondered what the scientific explanation was.

So they were interesting, but it really didn’t resonate with me.

I also checked out Transcendental Meditation, but quickly realized that I wasn’t the kind of guy who could sit still for long periods of time.

About this time, I had made arrangements to go to NYC to see a Francis Bacon show at The Met. My patron was covering my bills while there. I was going to catch a ride most of the way there with some friends of a friend who were driving a caravan to Maine where they were going to homestead.

So we packed up all their stuff into an old school bus, a pick-up truck, and a VW and I headed off to fulfill my destiny. I felt certain that I was going to find my answer in NYC.

I drove the VW. It had three beehives on the back seat. Somewhere along the way, one of them started leaking. The car began to fill with bees, so we ended up towing it behind the bus.

A little further along on our journey, the bus blew its engine. We had to waylay on a farm while the engine was being rebuilt. We slept in a barn.

One night, while there, my friend sat up in the middle of the night, sound asleep, and started talking to me in tongues (and this guy is the least religious person I have ever known in my life). It freaked me out, but it made me all the more certain that I was nearing my destiny.

At some point we parted company and I hitchhiked the rest of the way in.

I stayed in a YMCA. Went to the Met show, other museums, lots of galleries, but spent most of my time looking for…..what? I had no idea, but I knew I would recognize it once I found it.

Met the Hare Krishnas, but I thought there was no fucking way I was going to shave my head and do that routine.

I remember meeting some older gay gentleman who seemed to have plans for my life, but I wasn’t interested in doing that either.

Finally I met this cute Japanese girl who seemed determined to get me to go and hear a lecture. She spoke broken English, but it was clear that this had to do with God, so I told her I would go.

Turned out that she was with The Unification Church.