Arnold David Clapman  

The 60's

1962 Greenwich Village in New York City was a hurricane of sex, drugs and folk music that later became folk rock. Armed with a set of bongo drums and a change of clothes, Arnold moved from Baltimore right into the eye of it. Playing in various coffee houses, he got a job playing bongos with Ram Jim and the Calypsonians. switched to congas and eventually became house percussionist at the Cafe Bizarre where he backed up everyone from the world champion Tommy Ray and the Carib Steel Band, Richie Havens, Jose Feliciano and other future greats to the Ronettes and the Smothers Brothers. 

 

Between shows when Arnold wasn't jamming with noted jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot, he hung out at Googies and other Village watering holes, sketching strange abstract figures in a dog-eared sketchpad. Many of these drawings were rescued by Richie Havens and incorporated into a book of poetry he was writing. Arnold met Richie in a Macdougal Street portrait parlor where they both sketched tourists between shows. They remained lifelong friends ever since and formed a NYC production company in the 80's.

 

 A few years later Arnold married actress and dancer Nancy Hall and moved to Cambridge MA. With the help of his mother-in-law Elizabeth Hall, he soon found work at Harvard's Grey Herbarium as a botanical artist to support his fledgling family and began painting canvases at home that captured both memories from his past and aspects of his new life. Though the use of strong black outlines gave many of these paintings a cartoonish look, these paintings also possessed elements reminiscent of Cezanne, Van Gogh and Toulouse- Lautrec. Then came another Picasso-inspired period that lasted until the end of the 60's and produced a series of abstract and painterly works.