Painting: Oil on Canvas.

Painted: 2000-2001

Size:12”x 9”

Owner: Personal Collection

Music Selection: “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles

This is one of my favorite paintings. It is small but took a great deal of time to complete. I began to elongate the faces and layer upon layer of different pigments to get the tone I was looking for. Beautiful women are boring. I would rather paint an interesting face. We are too wrapped up in beauty. I also love glasses because the shape and color can portray characteristics of the person’s personal beliefs about themselves without a single word. The background is a chaos of bird silhouettes. This simple work took an extraordinary amount of time to produce, and it took time and a lot of work to make it look uncomplicated.  I tried to get a Yin and Yang effect using shadows on her face. I wanted the viewer to feel the complexity in the things we take for granted. I want the viewer to see that there are positive and negative forces at play even in those that have no effect on our society. There are no accidents in what I paint everything is deliberate. My wife says I think too much.

This is the lady that feeds the birds while sitting on the park bench of every big and small city that has a public area.  The viewer must look for her motivation. What drives her to feed these mindless flying rats that deposit copious amounts of fecal matter over every inch of our public spaces. Is it compassion or delusion? Is it a form of meditation? Is it a release of some inner struggle? Is she a nun or is she a homeless soul? What is her story? Only the viewer of the painting can fill in these blanks. Is looking at this painting the same as her sitting and feeding the birds?

Robert Frost wrote poetry that could be interpreted by the reader. The reader many times had a much better story and got more out of the work than that of the poet. This is the purpose of my art. It is not about what it means to me, but it is about what it means to you. My painting will never rival that of a Frost’s poem, but we can still have fun speculating about the meaning of these poorly produced works. I enjoy hearing what others see or interpret from my paintings and often it is much deeper and more interesting and profound than my original thought.