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.
Gambling Heads—Stuttgart, 2001, Acrylic on canvas, 14 x 48 in.
I'm attracted to the outrageousness, the acid coloring and quality of light of the American gambling casino — an atmosphere that maintains a perpetual sense of night, no clocks allowed, time is lost, responsibilities abandoned, as money moves. There is a constant shiftyness, uncertainty, edginess — a sense of silent watching and being watched. As a painter, a natural voyeur, I am both watcher and watched.
The European gambling casino has a different sense—less garish, seemingly more elegant, in a black-tie atmosphere. It is not the world of baseball cap and anything goes — jackets and ties are required; if you come without, you rent at the door. It is nighttime entertainment, not round-the-clock. It has tradition, a tradition harking back to Doestoevsky's time and before, when the spa culture, "the Cure" was the activity of the day and the gambling casino was the activity of the night.
As the Disney theme park has emerged with the gambling arena it has infused this usually covert world with an insidious candy-coating that belies its true nature. But candy-coated or not, deception is always the name of the game. In the end painting, too, is a deception and a gamble.