“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

The third and final (for now) print in my become-a-human-color-separation-machine series (that’s not really what it’s called) is complete, just in time for holiday shopping madness. Or whatever kind of madness it is we’re having right now. But supporting artists is never mad: For every $1000 in sales, I will buy a piece of art from another artist, passing on the love and money. It’s called Artist Support Pledge, a way of getting through this together, and the brainchild of UK artist Matthew Burrows. There are a number of initiatives to buy from artists and other small businesses directly this year, and I hope the sentiment continues. It’s a challenge for anyone to make a living at their craft even when there isn’t a pandemic.

But back to my true love, CMYK printing! This new print is the most chromatically complex of the series, making more use of layering and transparency to render, for example, fat (get it?). Additionally, I was trying to create more space in the picture plane, still using the inherently flat process of cut paper stencils. Inspiration came from looking at lots of still lives—from old Dutch masters to Wayne Thiebaud, with stops at Matisse and Morandi—and I finally settled upon simple repeating elements of circles and lines, along with a gingham ground whose linear perspective would add depth and hopefully tie the whole thing together visually.

Ham and pineapple recur throughout my vast collection of mid-century cookbooks, always touted as “Hawaiian” in the same way that topping anything with avocado makes it “Californian.” The title, Hollywood Hawaiian, references the general feeling of fakitude attached to the word “hollywood”, as well as a Warren Zevon lyric.

Earlier this year I was already at a juncture in my painting where I was questioning everything about it that had worked up until now: process, materials, subject matter, scale, context, everything. I was ready for a reset . . . be careful what you wish for, reset-wise. I started this screenprinting project partly to have something physical and technical to work on while I worked all that out. I have since learned that big-ass social and personal upheavals wreak physical havoc as well: they bring about physical neurological changes and we have to kind of re-wire our brains afterward. As it turns out, boiling the visual world down to its most elemental properties—flat shapes cut with a knife, four colors—was the perfect exercise for my pandemic-addled noggin. I still don’t know what it’s going to look like when I resume painting in the coming weeks, but these prints are an integral part of my new wiring.

“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

Art Basel and all of the related Miami Art fairs were cancelled this year for the pandemic. The following essay, which I wrote after participating in the 2008 fair, was published in ArtDish that year.

There are worse things than having too much art. That’s my conclusion after spending four exhausting days looking at art, hawking art, having art hawked at me, talking about art, feeling oppressed by art, and ultimately accepting all of it, the good, the bad, and the pretentious. This year I made my first visit to the phenomenon known only as “Miami” in artistic circles, characteristically timing my introduction to this festival of art-mongering to coincide with a worldwide economic near-collapse, and amid much talk about the recently-booming art market going bust. Making my living as an artist, I’m invested in, ambivalent about, but ultimately fascinated by the symbiotic, historically protean relationship between Art and Commerce. The economic milieu surrounding this year’s fair cracked the bedroom door open a bit and provided me a glimpse into some of the ambiguities of that relationship.

“Miami” usually refers to Art Basel Miami Beach, the large and prestigious international art fair that takes place in the Miami Beach Convention Center each December since 2002, along with the numerous satellite fairs that have since sprung up in its immediate vicinity, as well as in an outlying colony across the bay in Miami’s Winwood district. These fairs range quite a bit in size and flavor from those nearly as tony as Art Basel, to tiny fairs of unaffiliated artists crammed into beachfront hotels. In the vast middle category, many respectable commercial galleries set up shop in hotel rooms, sportingly making the best of the bad draperies and carpet. This year the Miami Herald counted 23 fairs, but some I’d attended were not listed, so the number could be much greater. I was embedded with one of my galleries at Art Now, my own work being exhibited along with other gallery artists in our booth in the lobby of the South Seas Hotel. I came along to help out my dealer with the booth, to do what I could to promote the gallery and myself, and to observe the parade of humanity and its creations on display in this legendary tourist trap.

My first impression of Miami Beach was that it was the kind of tacky old-school beach town I adore, and my second was that it was the perfect setting for hawking wares of any kind on a massive scale. Everywhere I wandered hucksters were huckstering, peddlers peddling. All along the oceanfront street where I was staying, for example, the seating for the restaurants spilled out over the entire sidewalk all the way to the street, forcing all pedestrians to walk through what is essentially the middle of the restaurant, where invariably someone waved menus in their faces and attempted to seat them. After walking through five of these on the first night and at least ten more the next morning, I not only got used to ignoring the menu-wavers, but also began to feel a kinship with them. Really, what else was I, or my dealer, or any of the high-brow art brokers, there to do ourselves? Similarly, at dinner one night, my companions and I, seated at an outdoor table, were approached by a roving illusionist trying to sell us a tableside magic show. He specified he did not work for tips, because he did not trust the public, but instead charged a ten-dollar fee. We laughed, but who could blame him? What artist has not encountered the boorish lout who balks at the cost of a moderately priced piece of art, oblivious to value of the artist’s time and skill invested in it? I could relate, although we did decline on the magic show. Peddling illusions was getting a little close to our turf.

Walking home that night, I noticed that someone had outlined in colored chalk the long, streetlight-cast shadows of lightposts, newspaper boxes, parking meters and the bikes locked to them. The outlines lent substance to the ghostly shadows and had the urban, spontaneous feel of unofficial public art that isn’t commissioned by panels of art-history majors. However, as I walked along, I eventually noticed that the artist’s name had been added in chalk in places, along with the number of the booth in which to find him at the Aqua fair. My spontaneous unofficial public art was yet another sales pitch.

I’m not complaining, exactly. Art has been intimately connected with advertisement of one kind or another for millennia, and quite blatantly so since the Renaissance. Artists have pitched religious views for the Church, or served the secular interests of their patrons, and the art that manages to give us something beyond those sponsored messages is the art we still value after the messages themselves are no longer so pressing. I will venture that a contemporary work of art is first selling the idea of itself as art. A Duchampian readymade or a DeKooning drawing erased by Rauschenberg is practically shouting to you that it’s art, dammit. Many contemporary installations and performances are pitching their case for themselves as art by their very opacity to the average viewer, sometimes by the prestige of their settings or the identity of their sponsors.

And we are as overloaded with art as we are with its redheaded stepsister advertising, as we are with the products that the stepsister peddles. Even as economists worry that we are not buying our usual glut of those products and doing our part to maintain the unsustainable model of more, more, more, we apparently haven’t gotten enough of either buying stuff or looking at art. In past years Miami’s been described as a veritable feeding frenzy of collectors fighting with each other to buy, buy, buy, the newest, the latest, the hottest. This year, in a depressed economy, there were still plenty of people from around the world, and some were buying, but it was more of a viewing frenzy, in which a wide cross-section of people took part. In the few hours a day I wasn’t tending our booth, I joined groups of brightly-clad retired New-York ladies, shiny Europeans with fashionable eyeglasses, local Cuban families with small kids, in looking at art, taking in eight fairs in all myself.

I hit Art Basel first, determined to see the entire exhibit, and I stayed for three hours, knowing full well that my ability to make sense of visual phenomena would give out after an hour or so. The huge convention hall was divided up into a labyrinth of interconnected exhibition spaces, occupied by 250 galleries in all. Here the aproned restaurant barkers were replaced with tiny blond underpaid MFA grads in pointy heels and black dresses, but the idea was the same. They enticed you by ignoring your presence, and their menus had no printed prices because if you had to ask . . . well, you know the rest.

Playing it safe, many of the galleries had opted for pulling out secondary-market stuff by known artists, so there were a lot of Chuck Closes, Cindy Shermans, Barbara Kruegers — it sounds like a who’s who of the ’80’s — and of course an abundance of Rauschenbergs since he died this year. But I gravitated toward anything that might hold promise in the way of painting, and I remember, in no particular order, Barack Obama (one of several) in a Grant Wood style, and plenty of those Neo-Rauch-influenced German Figurists with their clashing primary colors out of the tube and thin, loose brushwork. I also paused to look at an installation consisting of twenty plaster people wearing 3D glasses and watching a movie of geometric shapes engaged in loud sex with a miserable- looking Slavic woman in attendance.

As I pressed on through the aesthetic smorgasbord, I was haunted by a creeping sense of futility. We’ve known about the image glut for decades, yet we, and I implicate myself here, keep adding to it. Onward through a blur of resin-coated paintings, pointless installations, more Rauschenbergs, and the giant C-prints that seem to be everywhere these days, I started to resent photography in particular, with its capacity for high image emissions, for being the equivalent of an SUV in the rapidly warming visual environment.

Just outside the nearly-last booth of the last aisle of Art Basel, and well past that day’s saturation point, I had an epiphany of sorts. In the cubicle of a Tokyo gallery, a man and woman were seated atop a wooden structure. Whatever constituted the artwork they were peddling was apparently behind and under them, and they were wearing puffy moon booties over their shoes to protect it. In spite of my indifference to most installation art and my mental and spiritual fatigue, I gamely entered the passageway encircling their platform. It was unremarkable even as far as installations go — you enter the plain hall made of untreated 2×4’s and plywood, squat down to look in a round window, and see yourself on the other side. (How’s my lipstick holding up.) Keep walking and there’s a small picture of a forest hanging on the wall. (Whatever.) Keep walking and look through a window opposite the one you looked in earlier. (Oh look, another window). Garden-variety installation art, one of hundreds of artworks I’d looked at in the past three hours, and thousands I’d loved, hated, or been annoyed with in my lifetime. But I look anyway. I’d walked through the damn thing even though I was nearly certain it would provide no enriching aesthetic experience.

People I know who’ve gotten tattoos, piercings or other forms of voluntary self- inflicted pain talk about getting past the agony of having their skin poked full of holes to the ecstasy of the endorphin rush. I was having mine now, in that dumb plywood hallway. I had hit the metaphorical plywood wall at the intersection of Too Much and What’s the Point, and pushed through to the other side. Bad art, good art, lame or pretentious art, I couldn’t help but admire our human beings’ persistence. Shiny things! Piles of household objects! Another Obama! Japanese people in booties on raw plywood! Bring it on! Go, Art!

Suddenly I wasn’t depressed anymore about the overabundance of art, nor existentially angst-ridden about continuing to contribute to it myself. The planet is melting, people around the world are killing each other over old tribal grudges, the world economy is on the brink of collapse . . . there is no rational reason why we should be stuffing ourselves with attempts at beauty and meaning, but there never has been. The fact that we are, even badly, could make a person think twice about writing off the species.

That evening, at the Art Now opening, the day’s revelation made me feel a bit more solid about my own role as huckster. As I repeated my schpiel about my own work to fairgoer after fairgoer, I could recognize the glaze in their eyes from overindulgence in art. Yet I continued to serve the intoxicated, because that is my job, and I’m beginning to embrace it.

The next day I continued to overindulge, trudging through booths covered in newspapers, graffiti, and duct tape, all the tribal markings of “alternative” at the more indy-flavored New Art Dealers’ Association (NADA) fair. In a booth covered in video screens, a young blond Italian woman texted ferociously next to a white pedestal that was tipped at a rakish angle by a roll of caution tape. There were the obligatory eviscerated mattresses, piles of household junk, manga-like cartoon characters on ragged paper taped to the walls, boxes of ammo, more duct tape, a guy on a lawn chair in a khaki suit, bunnies, big-eyed girls, piles of dirt, more graffiti.

I was still feeling oversaturated despite making my peace with oversaturation, and a little jaded, when I spotted two bearded men on folding chairs crocheting a soft pink undulating object and gravitated toward them. They were Dutes and Stan, a married couple / performance team from Chicago, and they had been working on their big pink tube since 2003, working out from the middle in opposite directions. They estimate it to be about 50 feet long and consider it a kind of metaphor for relationships, particularly their own. According to the artists, “when it was shorter it had a more phallic quality, and as it’s gotten longer it’s become more of an umbilical cord.” While more fiber connects them today than when they started, one could also say they’ve crocheted their way apart. But they were sitting close, the tube heaped in piles around their chairs, and the overall effect was rather cozy. Most of their work, it turns out, is done in public spaces for the non-art crowd. I found their amiability a refreshing antidote to the audience- alienating, interiority-fetishizing vibe of much highbrow Performance Art, and to the stridently avant-garde art quality of much of the art surrounding it at the fair.

If it had seemed a little weird for mainstream commercial galleries to be setting up in hotel rooms, as they were at most of the Miami Beach fairs, soliciting the business of moneyed collectors, then the idea of individual artists in various states of desperation displaying their wares in lower-rent hotel rooms, beckoning to passers-by, gave me a slightly unwholesome feeling, and perhaps hit a little close to home. So naturally I wasn’t going to miss the Artist’s Fair, nestled in the dilapidated grandeur of the Sagamore hotel, its spacious marble lobby smelling of stale cigarette smoke, hanging in the air like bad performance art since the 1970’s when the place was apparently last redecorated. Up an almost-grand marble staircase, the artists were crammed into the myriad corners of what looked like a succession of small party rooms, jammed together in a maze that I gave up on navigating about halfway through. Much of the mediocre painting went in one eye and out the other, like most everything else I’d viewed that day. But again, I had to admire the enterprising spirit of people going to great personal expense and risking humiliation just to give it a shot. Some were probably hoping to be discovered and attain commercial success, others, armed with dense, wordy manifesti, just wanted the world to hear their message. I paused at the booth of an “artist and open-heart surgery nurse”, a tiny space stuffed with 33 numbered gold-spray-painted suitcases, long enough to pick up the intriguing press release/ manifesto she proffered. In it she described the suitcases, which contain her patent application, as simultaneously an art installation, invention application, business plan, marketing ploy, spiritual quest, and self-portrait.

That pretty much sums up Miami.

Top: Zoe Myers, owner of Heineman-Myers Contemporary Art, with a sculpture by Jonathan Stein.

The screen prints I’ve been working on these past few months are part of a project called the Artist Support Pledge. To help support each other during the pandemic, artists around the world are offering works of art for $200 (or €200 or £200). When an artist reaches $1000 in sales, they buy art from another artist. For me, the first part, making the jello and viaduct screen prints, was satisfying and engaging and fulfilled a number of artistic goals. The second, selling them for less than $200 each, was also satisfying because a lot of people could buy my art at that price, and I could pay some bills. After I quickly sold the first seven Joy of Jello‘s, it was time to make good on the third, and most fun, part of the pledge: Buying art from other artists!

Looking at all the available art tagged “artist support pledge” proved somewhat overwhelming. There is a lot of great affordable art out there right now. My life was simplified when an email newsletter arrived from the inimitable Shari Elf. I’d met Shari about five years ago at Art Queen, her studio and gallery in Joshua Tree, California. Shari makes delightful art from trash, among other goodies. She is also the founder/proprietrix/curator of the World-Famous Crochet Museum, which is housed in an old Fotomat booth in the Art Queen parking lot. Shari’s place is one of many cultural riches of the high desert area, which I wrote about here. Her current newsletter featured some new pieces that spoke to me. The Pink Poodle, pictured above, spoke particularly loudly. The speaking poodle needed a friend, so I also snagged the Bluebird of Contentment.

In 2018, a couple years after my visit to Joshua Tree, I came across this giant photo of the Crochet Museum in Charles de Gaulle Airport (proving it really is World Famous). It was, oddly, part of an ad campaign for HSBC Bank. The message is along the lines of “fortune favors the bold.” The bank appears to be taking credit for various peoples’ eccentricities, but there is no actual connection between the museum and the bank. Perhaps if they’d paid Shari to use the image, then fortune would indeed favor her and their slogan would be proven true. Go, capitalism.

Speaking of capitalism, there are still some prints left in each series, available on my shop page.

Buy the Left Lane Ends screen print here.

During the last two summers of the Before Time, I made a point of getting out regularly to sketch Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct before, and then during, its planned demise. This hulking hunk of concrete, built in 1950, was basically a wall of noise, darkness, and looming collapse between downtown Seattle and Puget Sound. I had a studio overlooking this monstrosity for ten years, and sometimes I’d draw it out the window. I later made one of the drawings into a series of etchings.

But more often I have experienced this thing from below. Any walk or bike ride from downtown to the water necessitated spending time underneath the viaduct. You would try to get out from under there as quickly as possible, because it was a well-known fact that it would (not “could”) fall down on your head in the event of any reasonably-sized earthquake, which not a rare occurrence in these parts.

The project of drawing it, however, did one of those things art does: it forced me to appreciate this ugly thing and to acknowledge its perverse beauty. I was surprised to discover that it actually had something that could pass for a style: the repeating buttresses, if you looked at them all lined up together, are almost Art Deco. Almost. On the other hand, I also became more aware of how oppressive it was. You don’t realize how much daylight four lanes of concrete can rob you of, until you go to draw it. Most of the interesting views were from underneath, and it was cold and dark under there on the nicest summer days. I learned to bring along a sweater.

For the second of my 2020 screenprint projects, I decided that I would try to tackle this beast. I pulled out all of the watercolor sketches I’d made and picked one to adapt to a cut-stencil DIY 4-color process.

A watercolor sketch is loose, spontaneous, and often benefits from the accretion of detail. Hand-cut stencils printed in four colors is pretty much the opposite of all those things. Translation required a daunting level of editing and simplification. I started out by tracing the watercolor into a simple line drawing, then scaling that drawing up to the size I wanted. I traced over parts of the drawing again and again, dividing them into sections by color and transferring them to pieces of tyvek. Each of these steps made me lose some extraneous flourishes and helped me get closer to the essence, the concrete hulkitude of my subject.

A technical problem I ran into was that a lot of items were free-floating and would fall away if I tried to cut them out. For instance, I couldn’t block out the yellow signs in the big grey stencil I was making for the freeway, so I had to divide it in two parts. This actually proved to be unexpectedly beneficial when I went to go about creating the layered tones for the receding arches. The farther-away buttresses were made with five successive passes of the same transparent gray; at each pass I would cover up more of the stencil, so that the closest buttress was the darkest. I went through a similar process with a darker gray for the larger parts in the foreground

Beyond the freeway itself, I also had to decide which details were essential to the impulse of the original drawing and therefore would make it into the print. Color, of course: There were those bright yellow signs, in two different shades. I also loved the pedestrian and traffic light icons, the latter echoed in the real traffic light in the shadow of the freeway. But really, my favorite detail, and the reason I chose that vantage point in the first place, was the ominous “Left Lane Ends” sign. The left lane was going to end, all right. All the lanes were going to end.

(I returned to the same spot a year after making the sketch, while the demolition was in progress. Atop a pile of rubble, the “Left Lane Ends” sign was still dangling from its pole, as if to say “I told you so!”)

So I really had no choice but to pour a cup of tea, haul out the economy pack of x-acto knife blades, get comfy and start cutting.

In case any fellow CMYK afficianandos are reading, here’s the breakdown, in order: Nine layers of K (black to civilians), in two different transparencies, for the concrete; one Y layer for the signage; a very transparent M (magenta, to those of you with a life) to warm up some of the yellows; C for the sky; a darker K for the letters and symbols; a stronger M for the red lights, and a final dot of bright C for the green light. A lot can go wrong in 15 layers, which is why this is a very limited edition of 12 prints. They are available for purchase on my shoppe page AND along with the Jello print are part of the Artist Support Pledge: Each time I reach another $1000 in sales of these works, I will buy art from another artist.

This print, “Joy of Jello”, can be purchased on my shop page.

When I first met screenprinting, it was love at first sight: The squeegees, the screens, the physicality of pushing the ink through the holes, the feeling of being a human printing press. But mostly I think I fell in love with it because it forces me to reduce images into their simplest, most essential forms and to just go ahead and DO it already. With a painting you can futz around with it for awhile and dither, putting off major decisions. It is nearly impossible to this in screenprinting. Should you lose your focus and start to futz, the punishment will be swift and obvious. And it’s just paper, so you try it again.

If there was anything my pandemic-addled brain needed forced upon it this summer, it was focus. Before any of this nonsense started, I had already been working on eliminating the dithering from my painting. I was wondering if I could paint in big, bold simple shapes of primary colors, and yet somehow treat my subject matter, particularly the people, with the same depth and dimension. The tiny food paintings were a move in this direction: the colors stayed clear and the shapes simple, yet they were also painterly. They were a successful experiment, but also a pretty low-hanging fruit cocktail, being so small and not on fabric. I then started several slightly larger paintings on fabric, but I’ve set them aside for a bit while I pursue the radical simplification of screen printing.

Andy Warhol famously said he wanted to be a machine. I finally understand what he meant. The particular machine I want to be is a color separation machine, the one that takes a multicolored image and decides how many dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, or black it takes to reproduce the colors. Nowadays that process is done with Photoshop or the like, but back in the day they’d take four pictures of the image, each through a different colored filter and a screen that divided the image into little dots of density.

I wrote a while back about my obsession with CMYK printing. It hasn’t abated. In fact, for the last few years, I’ve only painted with those four colors, closely approximating the printing primaries, but continued to mix them like paint. For this project I am printing with only one color at a time, controlling the density with transparency. The color separations I’m performing are radically simplified from even the traditional photostat process: Each image is made by pressing the ink through a tyvek stencil I hand-cut with an exacto knife. I determine what each color’s stencil will look like by transfering the image by hand on to each piece of tyvek, using only a carbon-paper-like material. It reminds me of using old mimeograph machine stencils. While the local communal printing spaces remain closed, and with them my access to fancier equipment, I’m really enjoying working so low-tech, using tools and materials I have on hand.

The Joy of Jello print is a limited edition—there are only 15!—and available on my shop page. Each print is crafted with by my own inky hands, signed, and numbered. These prints are part of the Artist Support Pledge: To support one another, artists around the world are selling affordable work (under $200 or thereabouts when you convert to pounds, euros, etc.). Once I’ve made $1000 in sales, I will buy some art from another artist (I can’t wait!). This is the first of several print series I’ll be selling as part of the pledge. Stay tuned.

I’m living it and the best part is my guests who stay in the room always make comments that they understand a lot about what the place means for me through your work.

Lisa Picard

Update: The Farmhaus was featured in the New York Times Real Estate section; scroll through the slideshow—one of my paintings even made it into a shot!

Late last year, I heard from my fabulous collector Lisa Picard. She was looking to acquire a painting for a modern getaway spot she’d designed and built in northern California, and had her eye on this one . . .

Alas, this particular midcentury goddess had already found herself a home. So Lisa decided to commission work specifically for her new place. She was drawn to the restfulness and solitude of the lady in her spare-yet-sort-of-busy modernist expanse. Lisa built her country retreat to be a relaxing gathering place for herself and her community of outdoorsy friends. She was looking for art that would embody restfulness, and also the dualistic nature of her work and life: developing dynamic, urban work places in big cities, but feeling equally at home pedaling her bike through rugged mountain terrain.

The commissioned work was destined for the guest room, which is in a separate structure from the main house and connected by a patio. It has a garage door that can open the entire room to the outside. The house epitomizes the California ideal of indoor-outdoor living—which is of course right up my alley! We ultimately decided on two facing paintings: One would capture the reviving solitude of this creative urban dweller’s country place; and the other the communal nature of both work and play. (Of course, at the time we had no idea that solitude would soon become a recurring theme for everyone, and communal bonhomie a fond memory.)

I spent the spring and summer of 2020 developing the imagery for the two concepts. The mid-century ladies whom I normally pilfer from magazines to use in my paintings are models posing as housewives. In my work they often stand in for the viewer; in this case the viewer was a CEO of a large company and her contemporary, active, nature-loving pals. The main character in the solitude/interior piece had to draw them in and feel like a kindred spirit, despite her fifties-housewife trappings.

I spent a lot of time on the geometry and perspective of the interior. As in the painting that inspired it, the space was to be largely defined by a tile floor. For this kind of project, I use a chalk line to draw the receding parallel lines of the floor and walls, anchored by pushpins at the vanishing points. I could geek out for hours about the particulars of perspective (and I have), but I’ll spare the reader that part of the journey. This interior took elements of two houses from a book of Julius Schulman’s photographs.

I swiped this gal from a Culligan ad. The magazine that she’s pretending to read features, not surprisingly, another Culligan ad. Like many of my star players, she’d appeared in a previous painting.

Choosing the fabric is critical; it sets the tone of the painting, and is the one thing (besides the shape) that can’t be changed. The choice is part instinctual, part circumstantial (a model had just scored the brown fabric and gifted it to me). In this case I was focused mostly on the main character’s outfit. I had already decided that the left one would be her top and the right one her pants, and planned to leave some matching curtains in the distance. The one on the right is kind of wacky, and I nearly swiped it for a dress for myself, but the sympathetic vibration between the stripes and the different shades of orange in the two together won out.

The second painting was to be set at night, from the outside looking in, and with multiple characters, perhaps at a party (remember those?) or its aftermath (yes, even more fondly).

This house is also a composite. I usually draw it first, then draw potential characters on separate pieces of paper, so I can pin them up and move them around. Scale is a matter of trial and error: I move a figure up and down on the drawing, to find a believable spot for someone that size. Sometimes they never feel quite right in the space and I have to toss them. Many of these people were cut from the scene.

The shape required me to build three irregular panels, one with five sides.

The phone lady is another recurring character from my past work. Her friend in the chair was someone I’d been wanting to use for years: she had me at the knee socks, but her setting is intriguing, too—a sort of flattened theatrical space. Perhaps the corrugated translucent fiberglass will make its way into some future painting.

I chose more oranges and browns for the fabric, to unite the palette of the two facing works. The brown tiki print would be someone’s groovy swimsuit, and also double as some sixties “primitive” art on the wall.

Both final paintings, and their stunning home, can be viewed on my commissions page.