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.
The Travelling series was an international outgrowth of my Freeway series which depicted domestic transits on the freeways of San Francisco. From local freeways I took a leap into international travel, with many trips both summer and winter throughout Europe and beyond to China and Russia. This was a time of major changes in the former Soviet block and China which were affecting even to this unschooled, Western observer. News reports of events in the former Yugoslavia made me wonder where the angels (so prevalent throughout European museums) were. Are angels reporters, guides, protectors? Where were they in this time of such upheaval and anguish? Overall, whether on foot, by car or train, I wanted to capture the sense of movement through time and space and the crossings of cultures as well as the sense of excitement, wonder and uncertainty that is part of travelling itself.
On the Beach—Russia, 2006, latex house paint on paper
The Baths sprang from a winter's visit to a mineral spa in Stuttgart, Germany. I was captivated by light coming through water and so many bodies illuminated and transfigured in the darkness of winter waters. Here strangers, stripped to a minimum, were pressed together in a public place where physical and psychological boundaries are put to the test.
Following the Baths series I began my Casino series, inspired by a chance visit to Reno with a European friend in tow. I was immediately 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. I wanted to catch the constant shiftyness, uncertainty, edginess — a sense of silent watching and being watched. As a painter, a natural voyeur, I am both watcher and watched.
On later visits to a Siberian casino and two in Germany I found a less garish, semmingly more elegant, black-tie affair when it came to gambling. The gaming rooms were high-ceilinged, wood-panelled and chandeliered with tables more blue than green. Coats and ties were the code; if you came without, you rented at the door. This was a traditional world, 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. Thus to me, the Baths and Casino series’ of paintings belong together; and it was the travels of the Travelling series that got me there.