I was drawn into art by watching my father Abe Allen (1909-1999, @Brownsville1909 on Instagram), a student of Hans Hoffman, drawing and painting throughout my childhood and into adulthood. He was a skilled draftsman, an adventurous experimenter and a dogged worker. He and my mother took me to see many exhibitions from an early age. My father moved through observational regionalist type work into abstract drip paintings by the late ‘50s – early ’60s so I think I can justifiably call myself a third generation AbEx painter, though my interests and my painting methods often derive as much from the Fifteen hundreds as they do from the Nineteen fifties.

My influences are too numerous to list, but from the twentieth century, Guston, Pollock, DeKooning, Beckmann, Soutine, and Matisse are major references.

I began taking figure drawing at the Art Student’s league when I was thirteen and later studied there with Will Barnett and Theodoros Stamos. Later, at The Studio School I learned from Sidney Geist, Paul Georges, George McNeil, Philip Guston, Wayne Thiebaud, Mercedes Matter, Leland Bell, Chuck O’Connor, Estaban Vicente and some of my fellow students. I worked as an Art Mover and handler for several years which allowed me to see some of the great privately held works in New York Collections and the amazing things kept in storage in museums and Galleries.

I began showing in group exhibits in the early eighties and had my first one person exhibition at the Rosa Esman Gallery in 1985. It received excellent reviews from John Yau and Barry Schwabsky and for a while I was selling everything I could make.

A full CV along with reviews are available on this site.