I remember, I remember Dumbo very well, I remember being under the Manhattan Bridge when you could still walk around down there. Now there�s a parking lot, it�s all fenced off, it�s all state property, but there was a lot more open space in the neighborhood. Con Edison owned a lot of property but they hadn�t put up fences and you could still walk through a lot of vacant lots.

I came back again in 1989 to do some drawings. Coming out of the F train, I noticed PS 7 was being renovated. Then I looked at St. Ann�s church and walked around Hudson Avenue. Then I went away to school and when I came back, I came back over here to look for apartment. I remember coming up out of the train and being totally disoriented because that entire block had been torn down, including PS 7.

I walked down Front Street and had a memory of St. Ann�s church but couldn't find it. I thought, "this must be the wrong block."

I found a place to live at 79 Hudson Street, and took me about three months before I realized St. Ann�s had been demolished. I kept pretending that I had the geography all wrong and that it was somewhere around just another corner. Every one who saw the church, mourns its loss. It's like the neighborhood got its front teeth knocked out. You just noticed it all the time.

What's on the site of the church now? A parking lot with garbage dumpsters. The lot where the church used to be is now zoned residential. They [Tocci Brothers, a garbage hauling company] couldn't build a garage there if they wanted to. It's interesting--we took their development rights away because they destroyed the church. That was kind of how we got back at them. It was a lose--lose situation. It's like everybody got to screw everybody else over. It's really infuriating.

I started painting the week I got here, I did a painting under the Manhattan Bridge, another on Pearl Street, and have been doing all those paintings on the corner of Hudson Street. I paint the projects over and over again, I'm fascinated knowing that the projects replaced in entire neighborhood to create this vertical ghetto.

MK: how did you first become a painter?

Well, my father was a painter, and I sort of grew up in his studio, watching him work, with the smell of turpentine in my nose. Painting is something that I always thought I would want to do at some point, but I didn't really start to do it 'til I went away to art school. I had expected to study architecture or film...But painting I realized was really the most important thing, because it's not a collaborative process...

After I started painting landscapes, I knew pretty early on that this was something I really wanted get at good as I could, at doing. (laughs, "that didn't come out right.") I wanted to see how talented I was with this new material of oil paint.

My father was born in Texas in 1941, and he came to New York City in 1966 to be a painter. He ended up going to Brooklyn College where he got his MFA in painting. He did a lot of cityscapes.

I have to say, he really had a big influence on me. In fact I've done paintings from some of the same spots where he did paintings 20 years ago, here in Dumbo, and Prospect Park and the Gowanus Canal. It's kind of an interesting thing because I don't find myself wanting to copy my father's work, but I think I have found myself interested in some very similar things. I'm sure my father had his own reasons for doing the paintings he did, which may be very similar to mine.

Unfortunately I'll never know because I never got the chance to know my father as an adult, and really ask him any of those questions. So, it's an interesting relationship I have with him, with his work.

We were on vacation, visiting some of his family down south, in Arkansas. It was my father, his girlfriend and I--my parents were divorced when I was three; my mother was in Brooklyn. We were driving one night and the driver of an 18-wheeler truck was drunk, and he was driving on the wrong side of the road, and it knocked our car a half-mile down the street into a ravine and my father was killed instantly. My father's girlfriend went through the windshield and broke her neck., broke her back. And I was in the back seat and both my legs were broken, my left arm in four places, I had a concussion, a broken jaw, ruptured spleen, broken ribs. The paramedics told me--I found out a year later at the trial, the paramedics told me that if they hadn't of found me when they did, I would have been dead in about 15 minutes--just bled to death. That was in August of 1980. I was seven.

My father's career as a a painter really lasted only 10 years, from 1970 to 1980. He was in a show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1976.

I'm very critical of [my father's paintings]. All of his work I have a very definite emotional attachment to, but as a painter--I think if he were here today, I'd be criticizing a lot of the work. There are things that could have been done a little better, I'm talking technically. But I've definitely learned a lot by having the work to study. What I have the most respect for is just his vision, his dedication to the subjects he was interested in. I may have inherited a similar obsessive dedication to the genre of cityscapes. I have about 100 of his paintings.

MK: Do you think about your father when you paint?