Toc's Bio 2006

Toc was born in Brooklyn in 1953. Since his father was a painter he grew up with art. "I have been obsessed with making art longer than I can remember, or so I'm told."

After serving a year in RISD in 1973, he knew that what he needed was not more academic skills, but to understand his self-the primary tool of the work. So he began to study and practice the discipline of (Zen) Non-dualism in Europe and the US for the next 10 years while making art.

In 1989, the toxic nature of oil painting led to a year of cancer. During that year Toc came close to death and studied life from that perspective. That time away from the world opened revelations about the proletariat nature of comic books and the virtually untapped possibilities inherent in that medium as art.

In 1990 he moved back to NY and began making comics. By his third comic he came to the attention of Roger Ricco of the Ricco/Maresca Gallery in NYC. On September 13, 2001, Toc had his first one man show at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery -a story told in 11 pages (each 30" x 50"), drawn in pencil on paper. This was two days after the towers fell ("The timing felt like a mythic wink").

Toc has published six graphic novels. He is the only one to have ever received two Xeric Foundation grants to publish. One of his books has been translated and published in France by L'association, Paris. Toc has been working for the last five years on his eighth book, and has been showing the pages with sculptor Tricia Cline (also of Ricco/Maresca Gallery) who he works with very closely and whose images and experiences come from the same Non-dualist allegory. This eigth book is a 55-page story of sequential images which are done on 30" x 50" pages, drawn mostly with a .3 mec-pencil. Toc is attempting to draw every impossible thing he can see inside as well as out.

-Tricia Cline - Woodstock 2006

I first wrote the following resume for Miho Nikaido in 2001 to take with her to Japan with my comics. She wanted to make a connection for my work there, she is very kind. Miho Nikaido is an actress and if you know her work you will understand what a wide-eyed honor this was for me. I have met only a few people (including Rishi's) with as much live "Presence" as Miho carries in her everyday life. If I say anymore, about how I perceive her, you will begin to think I am too strange to talk.
Anyway I recently handed on this resume to my brother O.D.Seeus who is my link to the art world and keeps my head above water, and all the Things that love me bless him. And …he likes this; my good bad-dog's-voice, because he is a good bad-dog too.

Toc's Bio/Resume 2001

I was born in Brooklyn to Mom and Dad in the summer of '53. After three years of eating and feeling the world, I came to realize that we were now living in a tiny house next to a big rock in what was a little tough town called …Suburbia.

This is where I first found out that I was to be a painter. I've carefully forgotten who told me so. Though... on a high stone pedestal lifted out of the very heart of the lawn next door, there was a blue glass ball that could speak English.

I spent a lot-a-time in the woods catching things that hide. I developed a rep for eating bugs, and studying quantities of pain … mine. I developed my hand-eye coordination by way of snakes, and my reading by way of Superman. My best friend lived in a rock and had no face and took me to the center of the Earth to warm my hands. I married a small woman named Poogee when I was five. She had a sad scar on her hand made from fire. She wore a white Sunday glove over it on which I drew a black ring.

For me, the woods were always watching and waiting, and so I was not in the house when my oldest brother, who lived behind his room-box door, was taken away to live with squirrels in their nut-house. He had seen "Lawrence of Arabia" nineteen times. He hasn't spoken to me since; I think he was mad that I could walk through doorway and he couldn't.

My other brother and I practiced order and ownership on small things and dammed any water that moved. At night we played a secret religious game on the street called "candling" in which you couldn't speak and had no rules. We are still talking to each other all the time. He is always finding ways to get some money for us. He's a real pal.

When I was thirteen I got kicked out of school because the length of my hair frightened my history teacher. So in 1967, we moved to the poor part of a wealthy town where the Mom and Dad, who owned me, finally got rid of my two older brothers, and I got solitary. In that quiet, I gathered images as lifelong friends, and my snake handling at Lorca's pond reached its undulating zenith (but I am no longer a King of snakes, we're all just friends now).

At this time I met Papa Wolf (my math teacher) and Eat Lions (who taught Tricks-of-Art). Eat Lions taught me a complete language of direct-observation for talking to your Self with your eyes. It is the language of the Witness (that she got from a guy called Joealbers) in which I can still hold an almost honest conversation with the many-me, (two-dimensionally speaking).

Papa Wolf, on the other hand, was the most fearsome other-world creature I had ever thought possible. My holy terror of him made me alert to his every word, which must be why he had me stand on a chair in front of his class and show them how one is to live (… though, of course I was faking it). I was a confused and ungrateful little bastard but I love him as a god. After four years of his brilliantly careful and leading words, Papa Wolf gave me a round trip ticket to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia as a graduation gift. There I was to drink an appointed wine while facing the Sea.

At this same time, Eat Lions finagled me into going to Risd, where I served out one year, and then was asked to stay away, please. After that, instead of going to Dubrovnik, I went to an experimental university in Switzerland to join a tar-gang in exchange for schooling. And for the next eight years I studied Vedanta and art under a small pile of very worthy people. During that time I was commissioned by Robert Bly to do art for a book of poems, (but the publisher fucked us... instead). The version that was not published was really my first comic.

At this time, because of the lulling words of the Magnus we were studying under, my childhood pal Eeo and I so believed in life, and each other, that we had a son we named "The-Light-That-Calls-Together-All-The-Gods-And-Makes-Them-Behave," but he, now, just calls himself Ramsy.

In 1979, I began a thesis work that required a good hiding place which we found in the Catskill Mountains for 100 bucks a month. I spent the next two years stroking black horses in the darkest light I could paint, (the dark in which life is revealed only by accident), while Eeo danced under Simone Forte, and Ramsy happily fought to the death all the monsters that surrounded him, he was a fine young killer.
In 1983, a friend who liked my work gave me a cliff-house overlooking the Straits of Juan De Fuca in Washington State. I spent most of the next three years (when not painting) creeping up on big animals. I have touched a deer, hid in herds of elk, and stood on the shadows of black bears.

From 1983 to '86, Eeo and I organized an environmental sculpture group called "The Softdoor Land Alliance" of about sixteen people from all over the US. These projects were process-oriented, three day constructions done in complete silence deep in the Olympic woods, using on-hand materials. The FBI (with guns drawn) named us "The Circus."

In 1986, I had my first one-man show at the Trevor-Sutton Gallery in Seattle, Washington. I was still immortal and not very sane at the time.

From 1984-90 I was commissioned to create environments for massive one-hundred dancer ritual-performances by Anna Halpirn in San Francisco. We had to move to Elephant Mountain and I had pieces in shows in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. (Remember... this is a resume).

In 1988, a patron of Eeo's work asked The Softdoor to come and live on her coffee farm in Kona, Hawaii, building ourselves box-studios to continue our various works. But I died shortly after we arrived of a disease I am still afraid to name. I'm okay now. My pal Eeo kept me alive by feeding me bits of her own heart. That is a pal! Of course my immortality had blown off, and it took me a long time to make it back to where life was. All that pure-and-sparkly-youth that had swaddled my perception was gone and I began my second life, as an old man living alone. Living alone in the Catskill mountains painting, and haunted by the smallest details of my death. Goodbye, Eeo, I'm sorry I died, I love you, bye pal.

And then one day I turned around and found my Self. And I was in love with a woman who could calm me with her joken and well-lit thoughts. She was a song with a perfect wound. She showed me to the Place where love is simple, and all dogs are good dogs. We-- she and her twin sister Elizzy and their son, HolyBean now live very close to that place that is Lower Utopia.

In 1992, I began to work for a highly eccentric gaffer down in New York City (the last animal of his kind). I became a sparker on independent films in order to eat. In my private life I carried my old art work down to the Creek-at-the-end-of-night, lit it on fire and waved goodbye. Then I began to write and document the lives of some friends I had met in my childhood, and while I was dead. In 1996, I put together my first collection of "The Lost and Found Season of the Most Pope Joey," my first comic in volume two of my Self (my second life).
(In the spring of '97, I worked on the most heroic film "Henry Fool", from which Pope Joey finally took his last name, having found his kin.)

In 1999, my very own Ramsy made a baby out of his spinning-heart with a lot of help from his pal Mimi who has a voice like sweet cool milk. And …Pope Joey's, volume 3, number 1, was published in "Lapin," a comic in Paris. Viva L'France! (Thanks, Thierry).

So now... is now, and I am still alive because I live in these comics. I live for them to tell me who I am and why. Then one day O.D.Seeus, (looking for his home), knocked on my door. O.D.Seeu is a born stranger, and smart as a top hat. We talked about my comics, he looked at my inks and asked how I was with a pencil. "Vectorific", I said (…as if…). So now I work my pages as big pencils (...always was my best language), and then through scans and digital water prints l'll condense them down into ("lushes") proletariat scale comics for Lower Utopia and friends.
(O.D.Seeus is a hero of my little piece of Lower Utopia. And the whispers say, "Isn't-he-the-one? Yes-he-is! Didn't the Ravens tell me he was coming? Yes-they-did! When did they tell me? Long ago.")

In 2001 I had my first solo show at the Ricco/Maresica gallery in NYC, it was of an eleven page comic "Kids of Lower Utopia" begun in the spring of 2000 and finished in the summer of 2001. It is number two of volume six of my " ...The Lost and Found Season... " It is pencil on paper, and the original pages measure 33" x 51", it is a monster. And I am now working on number three in the same mode.

(Imagine how bad this timing was, a gallery opening in NYC two days after the fall of the World Trade Towers. You can imagine my show, during the Thursday of the first opening we mostly hid in the back room drinking harps and peeking through a cracked door at the "three" people that showed up. Usually there are a few hundred or more. Roger and Frank rescheduled my opening for Oct 11, and again, two days after which America went to war with Afghanistan. A pattern you say? The show was up for two months, but people do not care about art when they are afraid of the future. Art is an act of enthusiasm for life, it is a reaffirmation of living. Art is civilization's trilling. Roger says we will try again later …when the trilling returns.)

Up with each and down with all … Long Live PopeJoey!

with love,
Your brother Toc