A Paint Box Theater: Buildings and People in the Streets 

I often walk about in Manhattan's historically rich, architecturally mixed-up, multi-everything Lower East Side. The loss of a 19th century synagogue to arson and its subsequent commercial development put a strong hold on me, or rather, the identity that it represented of the erasure of the progressive social/political history of New York. In my paintings, buildings are also characters that frame and seem to haunt the individuals moving about the streets. Certainly, they haunt me, for they symbolize aspects of the city's history, and as a native New Yorker, my history too. Other buildings are simplified or even radically schematized into symbols of generic anonymity.

My wanderings have frequently brought marginalized people to my attention: working class tradespeople, minorities, immigrants, addicts, and the homeless, in juxtaposition with children, young adults and the privileged classes. In the daily observance of the theater of the world, indifference and cruelty—the sadistic instinct— is deeply placed in Nature's universal scheme. It raises the great questions; of death, grief, and human survival. This theme has long been woven throughout my work.

 People are events; not facts. For me, the challenge, in depicting them, is always to honor their specific individuality—  especially in large complex paintings. The image of the street is a metaphor for the activities of life and the vitality of art, seen alternately in objective and subjective terms; as an outer reality in which we take an active role and as an inner world where the self is set apart, existing as if " beyond."

 Empathizing with the people I paint is a recognition that they may also be emanations of myself. Some images define scenes that have evolved into metaphors of larger social realities. In fact, certain of these scenes have not been comfortable to look upon, let alone paint.  The point is to elicit empathy over indifference—to bear witness.  

My larger project is an exploration of the tragicomic theater of life, a concept that stretches back to Plato and Plotinus. In this way, any assessment of the “true nature of things” must seek to intuit the essential “presences” behind ordinary reality, to reconstruct the world anew.  T effect this,I have maintained faith in the power of the  recognizable image.  This has allowed me to employ allusions to past art  as keys to the affective pictorial language behind the subject matter. What results over a body of work ia a marriage of styles; an art that is in conversation with both the distant past and the recent past.

In all of these works, I try to avoid ego-driven virtuosity, either hyper-real or painterly-expressionistic, to better emphasize subtle feelings and emotions. For me,art is not solely about art, or self-expression, rather it is a constructed symbolic meditation, the whole of which seeks to reveal the implied mythical richness of life. This series of paintings has been developing for several years. Each work has provided the sense of an encounter, initially intuited. Working slowly through revisions, I bring the painting from inchoate sensation to realized feeling and idea. In this way painting becomes a way of thinking, of coming to understand what one truly feels.