I remember making Spin Art paintings—before Damien Hirst!

During the height of tie-dye in the early ’70s, I became obsessed with making spin art paintings. We got our first taste of them at visiting carnivals, where for 50 cents you'd drip brightly colored acrylic paints onto a spinning paper canvas—the centrifugal force allowed us to create what we thought were mini masterpieces. After the carnival left town, we re-created a spin art machine—from a dismantled vacuum cleaner and couple of old hat boxes. Many, many years later, the artists Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst turned this carnival sideshow into million-dollar paintings. My gems are long gone, but not Hirst's Beautiful revolving sphincter, oops brown, (2003).