Bruce Daryl Barone:  

Life Although baseball was my childhood passion, I always considered myself an artist. And by the time I was thirteen I surprised everyone, including myself, with a portfolio of photographs, poems and short stories. I can vaguely recall a weekly column I wrote for the Ramsey High School weekly, "The Ram;" features that I prefer to pretend never existed. Nevertheless, so many artists, like myself, have experienced early forays with some form of journalism. A beginning begins somewhere. At Manhattanville College I absorbed the Pre-Raphaelite and Eliot traditions well, and my mentor did his best to make sure nothing after the "Four Quartets" was mentioned. So I became a William Blake devotee, and published an essay and catalogue to coincide with an art exhibition that I organized: "William Blake: The Apocalyptic Vision." Perhaps it was from this Blake tradition ("Without Contraries there is no progression"), that my cross-country photographic travels began. No matter, my near-starving in San Jose, California and automotive breakdown in an Oklahoma blizzard were crucial. Crucial were the travels and mishaps in the sense of "innocence" and "experience" and that imagination had to be...Expand for more