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Toys1992 Oil on canvas 30.0" x 40.0" Private collection This was a milestone painting for me. The image appeared on the invitation to a one-person show at the Edith Caldwell Gallery in San Francisco in 1992. It was instantly popular and sold before the show opened. It pointed my creativity down a new path: to oils, to larger canvasses, to larger-than-life scale, to different kinds of objects and composition. I had just returned from a three month visit to China and Thailand with my daughter, Starrs. During way-too-long bus rides, I told her many old family stories, which got me to thinking about my childhood toys, teen-age phonograph records, 50's cars, and so forth. Back in my studio, I was stuck for ideas. How to get back to work? I began rummaging around, picking out objects that I had owned for ages, some since my childhood - whatever caught my eye that day. I set them on a table against the wall and just started arranging and rearranging them, taking pictures as I went. My idea for the painting revolved around play and playfulness. Toys contains aspects that have exerted a strong influence in my subsequent paintings. Compositional decisions - the use of a flat, graphic background; cropping the image so the objects spill off the edges of the canvas; the use of larger-than-life scale; strong colors; objects whose surfaces tempered by use and age bring back memories of an earlier time - all this carried over into my works that followed. |