I often draw in other places. It’s when I’m on the move, outside the studio that I get my inspiration. The more I draw and attempt to capture what I see, the more I see. I start to see the relationships of shapes, the curves, the angles, the striking contrast as well as the incremental gradation of values from black to white, the subtle creep of colors from one to another in the sky or across a wall and then the sharp punctuation of an abrupt change. All this acuity comes with the act of drawing and the attention required to look at something and draw it…    

I'm always interested in making it feel as though you could walk inside my paintings, be a part of the painting. I like the hubub of the crowd. Viewers can then take part along with people in the paintings. Though the frame exists, boundaries are broken.

I call this series of paintings my Travelling series. In these pieces combining a diversity of people in congested public spaces, there is room for much interaction between people, with many different stories and subplots to be told. I have used multiple vantage points in these paintings in order to allow a viewer to enter them in many ways. There is no singular way to read them and hopefully there is enough ambiguity to inspire investigation.

I have always loved theatre, the realm of suspended disbelief where, when lights are dimmed and the curtain is drawn back, you enter another world. Puppets are a part of that world. They carry within their simple objectness—objects made of paper, cloth, leather, wood and paint—the hint, the possibility of life, of magic. When handled with skill we can suspend our disbelief and believe in them as beings with a spirit of their own.

I have always been interested in light emerging out of darkness. In the past several years I have been painting from drawings, memory and imagination. My subject has been people in public places converging around a singular activity. The realm of the gambling casino has offered a perfect avenue to satisfy both quests.

My love of the urban landscape, especially that of San Francisco, moved me onto the freeway—my studio away from home. Having lost a studio that gave me a fixed vantage point on the City, I chose a moving one—my car.

A primary focus for my work in the 1970s and 1980s was the industrial landscape which surrounded my former studio in San Francisco. I was particularly drawn to the nearby Bethlehem Steel shipyards. This grey world by day came alive at night as fierce security lighting and arc welder's torches illuminated and drew shapes out of the darkness.

For more than a decade I have been making paintings based on drawings, memory and imagination. My subject has been people in public places converging around a singular activity. The Travelling, Baths and Casino paintings, which evolved in this span of time from 1992 to 2002, provided a perfect avenue to deal with densely populated scenes involving boundaries between the public and private aspects of people's lives…