Posted by:
cludgie
(
)
Date: December 03, 2020 03:13PM
Hi. Thanks for the note and thanks for asking. He is fine for now. Just for the sake of some background and recall, in 2016, you may recall, he went into awake brain surgery for a very large brain tumor. Unfortunately, it was not a meningioma, but thankfully not the aggressive glioblastoma (GBM), from which there is never a return. Instead, he has a deadly, but slow-growing oligodendroglioma (ODG). He got most of it removed (a glioma is impossible to completely remove, and has completed chemo. For now his tumor is hardly there, but in time it will re-grow, and it will start again. It can be removed subsequent times, providing you can find a surgeon who will do it.
So right now, with COVID, etc., most of the whole art world is shut down. Artists mostly depend on galleries and having a gallerist. Right now, most galleries are shut down, and many or most have failed. It is not a good thing. So he's broke. I send him money, but naturally, it's not enough, what with him living in the NYC area. He has just found a job, which he has not actually done yet, teaching wealthy prep school kids how to improve their art portfolios, and I hope he's up to it. His speech was never the greatest--full of malapropisms and such. Now his speech is just a little damaged from the surgery, and he grasps for words. One negative thing was that the surgery left him with epilepsy. But on the plus side, he has been paying for an expensive kind of CBD, and just reported that he hadn't had a seizure since mid-July, and maybe that is because of the CBD.
But for now he is healthy and in good spirits. I think his art can be purchased online, but probably would require direct communication with him, which is possible if you're interested. He hesitates to sell it online, because that would be the kiss of death when looking for a gallerist to represent him in future.
It's often hard, seeing him now, to realize that he has a form of terminal cancer.