The Irascible Eighteen
oil on canvas, 107" x 80", 1994

The subject of my paintings is people-from the past, present, art history or my imagination-deployed against a painted groundplane seen from above. The poses and gestures of the figures suggest a directorial hand as though the scene had been staged for abstract, formal effect. In fact, the artist/director/me is usually seen as part of the tableau.The theatricality and artificiality of the proceedings is emphasized by the fact that many of the figures, props and space-defining planes, while convincingly drawn as three dimensional solids, appear to have had paint applied to them in a way that is aberrant or "wrong". Forms can be multihued where they should be monochromatic, pied where they should be all over; colors can disregard the bounding contours of forms and slide onto adjoining forms; the groundplane against which the figures are observed is subject to seemingly arbitrary shifts of hue. The resulting "disagreements" between surface and volume, figure and ground help to assert the abstractness of the elements and the autonomy of the paint apart from its role as an agent for representing. As such and along with almost everything else I do in painting, it's part of a strategy to see the tenets of classical Western figurative painting reposited in a postmodern( read new) context.

"Artist and Audience"
1997 oil on canvas 68" x 68"