This personality stems from an identity that was forged in my childhood.  Being the youngest sibling, eight years younger than my only brother, the name Philip seemed a bit formal.  Nobody apparently liked the shortened version of Phil when I was a child.  People commonly call me Phil now, many actually call me phriar phil.

My mother had pneumonia when I was born and I emerged as a kind of character type; narrow face, frail, highly developed motor skills, a bit shy in crowds but not retiring at all in smaller groups.  My name then was Fid.  Some people extended this to Fiddy, or some freely chosen variation, as a kind of endearment.  I never minded the names.  It wasn’t exactly an empowerment but it was unique.  I noticed my father spelled this name Phyd which looked cool.  This may also indicate that he was probably the author behind the name but I have no clear recollection of this.

As my artistic tendencies became more and more pronounced, especially drawing which started around the age of five, I gave it a French twist: Phydan’.  I was not isolated in this nickname thing.  I was not the only member within my family with a strange nickname attached to some alter-ego status.  My brother Charles was Chuckand with a silent d, my father Dadan, my mother Moman.  Later, Chuckand’s children would call their grandparents Moman and Dadan.  All this was done simply, without any attempt to clarify what was largely unrealized invention.

I was born in 1949 and experienced an idyllic childhood, free of the concerns my brother felt.  He was born in 1941, which came with WWII and the wholesale adjustments that most families had to make.  Perhaps, I might speculate that the domestic bliss that informed my early years, with nicknames, games, neighborhood kids my age, and so forth, led to an extended use of alter ego.  I believe this found its way into my creative expressions.

Rubicundus Vita roughly translated is intended to describe ‘the pink life.’  The adjacent picture shows one from a series of pieces called “My Work Seen Through Rose Colored Glasses.”  The gallery offers a kind of compendium of images that have been chosen because they are favorite things.  They also try to escape a rigid classification of what I laughingly call ‘my work.’  Things tumble freely across what has been, up to now, presented as categories.  The work was chosen first, then roughly arranged in the order in which it was produced, then adjusted to create the contrast necessary for effective display.  And so, the Rubicundus Vita is not thought of as a retrospective as much as a broad opportunity to express myself as ‘Phydan’.

In 2008, after a sharp decline in my health, intensive care and finally, by a rather incredible set of circumstances, I experienced a heart transplant.  Naturally  such an event affects one deeply.  Afterwards, I maintain an energized disposition toward the production of expression that would somehow manifest my feelings… especially as it pertains to the relationship between art and life.  I find it oddly contemporary that some things that I conjectured in the past are now things that I must put into direct application to further my life.  My focus is on art and science and the way they both compliment and stand opposed to each other.  I believe the reconciliation of these dynamics stand at the threshold of our cultural work moving forward.  The picture showing stitches on my chest seems a strange autobiographical prediction now – now that my youthful threshold has been eclipsed by my recent experiments with mortality.   I have changed my previous title ‘Art Attack” to “Prophecy.”  I was 23 when this piece was initially conceived.