View from the Far Side

Seeds

By Isaac Abrams

March 31, 2025

The seeds of my later life were planted early…

I have always had vivid dreams and dreamy days watching clouds and climbing a tree that was enveloped by vines that had flowers with a wonderful scent that were surrounded by bees.
I climbed a special tree and nestled in the natural hammock vines created. It was there that I read books, had vivid dreams half awake. The bee never bothered me.
When I was a kid, I loved summer camps and thunder storms.

When I was 10 I met Eleanor Roosevelt. She had an aura of light. I never forgot that moment.

When I was old enough I walked through Great Neck seeking a job. I got one working in a record store. It was the that I was exposed to Jazz, experimental music, Harry Partch.

Charley Mack was a musician and manager of Record shop. We did trips to NY Jazz clubs as a teen. He knew the players and I was introduced to many of them.
Charlie mentioned Mescaline when I was 17 … quote every leaf on a tree was a different green. It was a different world than the upper middle class suburb on long Island.

I READ Aldous Huxley The Doors Of Perception 1955 or 1956.

5 years later I met the legendary Jerry Jofen (1925–1993): He was a survivor who, with the rest of his family (high end Jewish Rabbis from Cracow) that was rescued to preserve the bloodline. Traveled though Russia, to Shanghai, to America. An astounding mind both magnificent and tragic.

Jerry Jofen was an artist who was the star creator of the The K Gallery (As in Kafka) who introduced me to Psilocybin in February of 1962.
My first First experience was in Brooklyn, I believe that he got the psilocybin from Harvard – how? I don’t know, but as Sicilians say, if isn’t true / It should be true…

The seeds of my later life were planted early… and Jerry was one who planted some of them. During this initial experiences We were driven from Brooklyn Heights
To Charles Theatre on Avenue B Experiment movies.
The cab was a smoothly shaven head of African descent. Nothing short of a genie
The driver pulled broad shoulders, shaven head and without missing a light, Manhattan to the left of us, over the Brooklyn Bridge, still no stops to the Charles Theater.
A perfect ride enhanced by the Psychedelic, perfection.
At the Charles Theater we saw a cluster of wonderful lost and garde/experimental films.
Later, in life I helped Jerry make some films. They are advant. gone forever but never forgotten.
A few years later. the Coda Gallery, showed such films Kenneth Unger, Jack Smith, Stan Bragage and most of all Harry Smith.

Incidentally Harry Smith and I were shown at the Centre Pompidou: in a show called Traces Du Sacré. The Traces of the Spiritual in Art… Also on the show were many artists including Hannah auf Klimt, a precursor of Psychedelic art, as well Henri Michaux and many othersour College friends abandoned us when they heard that myself & Rachel had take a drug!

My first paintings came after the closing of the gallery.
These first two or three were small works which helped me get grounded.
Then came my first real painting.

This painting is called HELLO DALI
60″x84″, oil on canvas, 1965/1966, collection of the artist (COA)

This is my first actual painting, that is my first attempt at a serious painting, a painting from the point of view of making art. The need for making it was simply since that I had not seen what I’d hoped to see, I had to do it myself.

I had never really imagined myself as an artist, never went to an art school, I was a complete novice and used a Sunday painters manual by Windsor Newton as a guide.

When the painting was complete I heard that Dali was staying at the exclusive St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan. I loaded the painting into a van, drove it to the St. Regis and carrying it up to the front entrance said “wheres Dali”? The door men were so startled that they opened the doors and pointed into the hotel.

I marched into the lobby and was directed into the Famous bar where the master was sitting with a group of three other persons. Seeing me there and seeing the painting, Dali rose to his feet and applauded. After introductions Dali said “come and visit me”. I waited a day and returned to the St Regis. Dali had departed that morning.

The meeting never took place and I was thrown upon my own resources and therefore remained self taught.
The painting, which I still own, has ever since been entitled… HELLO DALI

It is to be exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in a show called Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia opening in October and from there at the Cranbrook Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Detroit and then at the Berkeley Museum.