A Personal Note

I gave up . . .

on a gallery career shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century. Was it a solo show that winter that did it? How could a complex relationship with a subject have altered my plans? Why compose stories when I was trained as a painter? The limitations of art are the reason. Nudity in a studio classroom is academic. Almost anywhere else, a bare body is sensational.

Outside of school, I studied regular women. Whichever acquaintance I got to pose seemed ashamed of herself (regardless of her beauty). Our encounters went deeper than how anybody looked. Disrobing, itself, is psychologically charged. A singular picture failed to capture the complexity of a model. Reality wouldn’t fit into a frame.

My works of fiction are an attempt to portray the figure more broadly. None have any sex, profanity or violence. Each is an exploration of body image and identity. Like the prominent window onto the world in a lot of my compositions, they deal with the line between the private and the public. Clothes symbolize the artifice separating one from the other. They are, to quote In So Many Words, simply “props in ridiculous dramas that each of us made up if only to star in them.”