From a Tipi to Times Square...

A Real Life Photo of my Childhood (I'm the Baby)

As all stories must have a beginning of some sort, so will this; the story of how I ended up an intentionally unemployed starving artist with two very non-lucrative degrees in a city full of poor idealistic saps just like me. I suppose it all began when my two hippie parents met and decided it would be a great idea to move to the Rocky Mountains to teach wilderness survival...

My name is Forrest Harrison Gerke. I was born one very snowy day in a tiny town nestled at the foot of the San Juan Mountains in Southwestern Colorado, which is about as culturally far away from New York City as one can get without leaving the United States. My parents were bohemians who raised their children living in a Tipi during the summers, wandering through mountains and canyons with groups of weary strangers, teaching them how to live off of the land all around. All of my earliest memories involve being out under the enormous Western skies without any trace of civilization in sight for miles.  I know that most people my age have memories of their families sitting in front of color TV's eating microwavable meals on foldable TV-dinner trays, but my parents were different. My parents had a dream, it's true. Both of them grew up far away from the mountains of Colorado in very suburban settings back east and had every opportunity to lead boring normal lives with steady paychecks, health insurance, retirement planning, etc... Rather than becoming carbon copies of their peers, they moved to the mountains to pursue their dreams of running a wilderness survival school, firing their own pottery from natural clay and raising their family completely on the fringe of "normal" society. Although not every component of their 20 year old idealism was realized, they never stopped trying.

Now, this all sounds quite lovely, and it truly was, but there were some practical matters that perhaps my earth-loving parents had not planned for when taking us on their unique life's journey. While my peers spent their summers playing video games, watching Saturday morning cartoons and drinking sugary soft-drinks, I occupied myself by digging latrines, wading through muddy river beds and identifying edible plants. When I was at home, in my cable-TV-free environment, I spent much of my spare time riding my bike to the library and sitting on the dusty floor of the art history stacks for hours looking at books that were too heavy to carry home in my tiny backpack. The closer I found myself identifying with various dead artists, the further I found myself from relating to the people around me in the tiny little cow town in which I lived (the fact that we had a library at all, much less one with a small art history section, was a complete anomaly/miracle). Rather than sitting around on sunny days burning ants with magnifying glasses as many of my peers did, I would take a backpack full of books and my stuffed bunny (who was cleverly called "Little Forrest") out to a trash heap island in the middle of the irrigation canal conveniently located at the end of my dead-end street, and imagine myself in far off places doing exotic and bizarre sorts of things.

Stranded in the middle of a barren intellectual wasteland, I developed my own methods to amuse myself. I would tie Little Forrest to the handlebars of my bicycle, his long canvas ears flailing about in the wind, and together we would ride off into the adobe hills and pretend we were exploring undiscovered countries (even though they had been clearly discovered by hormonal teenagers who left the traces of their rural fornications behind them, as well as cowboys looking to unload their old junk, but unwilling to drive it to the landfill). Together Little Forrest and I lived out many extravagant adventures, that sadly never actually happened. I knew from the very beginning that I longed for a life dedicated to the pursuit of genuine beauty in the world. At the age of 3, my favorite book was HW Janson's "The History of Art," and by the age of 4 I had decided that I would be an artist one day.

Being a wildly vivacious and eccentric child only lead into an extremely eventful adolescence. As I've spent the years since trying to block out much of that time in my life, I'll skip ahead to college. In college, I finally found my niche. I enjoyed being part of the riff-raff sequestered away in the Visual Arts Building of Colorado State University, pushed to the very furthest corner of the campus. Although college made me realize how unique and strange my childhood had been in many respects, I realized that, as a whole, many clichés about art students are quite true and I had found my people. Earning my undergraduate degrees in Painting and Art history provided me with many of the happiest times I've had to date, but early-post-adolescence only lasts for so long, and before I knew it, 6 years after I had started, I was a college graduate at the height of a recession with no useful skills and absolutely no prospects for a job.

After starving myself to afford a studio space for a while, I realized that the only logical next step would be to really starve myself for an even more expensive and much smaller space in New York in search of my fame and fortune in the art world. So, armed with only my cunning wit, my two art degrees and five thousand dollars in easily depletable savings, I consolidated everything I own into two suitcases and set off into a much bigger and more crowded world, leaving the mountains, big skies and wide open spaces of Colorado far behind me. I don't know what will come of my rather irrational and unscrupulous decision, but this is where my New York story begins...