"Water Country" Painting

My fascination with scale dislocation began in Rome, where I lived 8 years. I painted still life as visionary cities, then placed giant figures in them. A Fulbright to study depictions of saints, and apply their strange fusion of the neurotic and sublime to portraiture, brought me there - a project begun in grad school at Yale ("Self-Portrait as St. Sebastian," etc.). That led as well to 'headworks,' self-portraits with the stuff of thought piled on my head. My 'horror vacui' spatial sense probably formed growing up in a large family; I also respond to foreshortening's cubist contradictions, wherein forms project into space while shapes stack up on the picture-plane. Recent work has been inspired by Atlantic City's "˜R. Crumb-meets-Antonioni' surprising beauty. AC struck me as a quasi-anti-Rome; both have small-scale visual drama and self-conscious architecture. But while Roman monuments epitomize the heroic function of architecture to endure, structures in Atlantic City last only as long as their frivolous functions do.