MY LIFE IN ART, ART IN MY LIFE by Max Reif

(below: "Wunderkind", painted after my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Abstract Expressionist Gallery in New York City in 1991.)

A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THESE PAGES
I've been painting now...with some fallow periods...for 40 years! Below are links to some pages that tell the story of how I got into Art as a grown-up, after having been sort of blown out of it as a child. There are some thrilling chapters to the whole unfolding tale! It's a Show and Tell, too...there are extensive Galleries of my work, although one of them, perhaps the most fertile period, remains pictorially incomplete. I may try to remedy that soon.

I wanted to get in here somewhere, that I consider myself, even after all these years of painting, a "primitive artist." Florence Childs, a lovely woman who lived in the Myrtle Beach, SC Meher Baba community for many years, told me once, "You're our Primitive Modernist!" 

I'm happy with that! For one thing, it puts me in company with artists like Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses, both of whose works I love. It's not that I haven't "studied painting," and to a degree, drawing. But what grabs me still is what people have called the childlike, naive glimpse of something, usually involving bright colors! 

Sometimes I feel myself doing "thing I can't do"...guided, so to speak, by some other hand. Often, lately especially, when I begin a painting that I've envisioned, I don't feel I have the skills to pull it off. However, if it's a piece I'm really determined to realize, because it expresses an inner experience I consider significant, I just persist. And little by little, something takes shape, that says what I needed to say. 

Below are links to navigating these pages. I've also put a link at the bottom of each page, to lead a reader/viewer to the next one. xox Max

LINKS FOR "MY LIFE IN ART, ART IN MY LIFE" 

Part 1: Art in my "Kali Yuga" American Childhood

Part 2: HOW ART SAVED MY LIFE! (paintings from the late '80s thru the mid-'90s)

Part 3: Meher Baba Paintings from the '80s and '90s

Part 4: Baba paintings 2016-2019

Part 5: Baba and Baba-related paintings 2016-19 continued

Part 6: Most recent Baba paintings (2020)

Part 7: My Friendship with Baba's Painter, Lyn Ott

Part 8: Other Influences 

Bonus
Meher Baba Videos by Meher Bheem, using my paintings and songs

Love's River

Mercy's Ladder