These are paintings from 1997, between studios, and kind of down and out.

This painting I saw at Palechko square, another one of those works that sat in my subconscious for a couple of years- I could see it in my head; but when i got on tram 17 direction branik, I wasn't quite sure where this view lived. As it turned out the best angle through the mirror was on the edge of a tram island, between a busy street with huge Tatras rushing by and the trams. By this time i was no longer living in the darkroom at the Social kultural center and i had lost my studio, so Rob, the manager at the globe, let me store my paintings in the sklep there: thus I could continue painting, sans studio, but ONLY outside, at the place. It was a windy spring, and a big painting shaped like a hanglider tends to want to fly out into oncoming traffic... the coolest part of this picture was when Alice, her baby Mirabella, and the Israeli photographer Tal showed up. They distracted me for a bit but then i got them to cross into the reflection of the mirror. For whatever reason alice came out well and even tal's bandy legs were recognizable...

  
Mirrabella's

Mirror

1X1.5

  

The problem with a studio in all the world, is to find a roof from under which there is a view- so this desolate train station, some procommunist relic, was a wonderful sheltered space from which to paint. in the uncertain days of late spring in Prague, when the weak sun alternates with rain clouds, the light can be exceptional, glinting off the wet buildings, and free in the rain cleansed air.

  
Bubenec

Nadrazi

0.75X1.25

  

Since I was working in Holisovice, i thought i should do something that reflected the industrial character of much of that area

  
CKD

0.75X1M

  

After having lived in the panalak(the huge stalinest era housing blocks of Prague) for a couple of months i moved in with Lee, Mette, and Stuart on Veletrzni. While sharing a room with stuart for awhile was a grotty situation, veletrzni was a nice address. I would put this painting on the back porch while Mette or lee would be brewing up some dinner, it was nice to have them watch the progression of the painting. there was a period in the afternoon from about 4-7 when the light was perfect. Again i tried to show the flow of the light at different times over the forms

  
Veletrzni

1.25x1M

  

This Painting is very special to me-it was extremely difficult to get up the scaffolding on the church of St. Nicholus in Malastrana. I first ascended the church one early fall morning in '96, With my friend Hedwige. I had stayed out all night at the roxy, and all the inebriatory activities that implies, then we walked to malastrana to climb the church and wait for the dawn. We stayed up there until the film would work and i vowed i would return to make a painting there. Unfortunately on the way down I fell, bruising my liver and caused a winter retreat to the States. Even when I had returned the following spring it took a month talk to the right person who would let me up in the daytime-it turned out to be a worker on the scaffolding and not all the administrators and bishops I had been trying to see...Suffice to say that going up at 7 in the morning and painting for a day while the scaffolding was being removed around me was quite an intense experience

  
Towards

Smichov

0.5X0.75

  

the next series was seven days a week, in which I started on a Monday and made a painting every day of the week until Sunday. Very little work was done on the paintings after the initial day.

  
Monday  zizkov
Tuesday
 after the

main station
Wednesday
 smichov
Thursday
 masyrikovo

nadrazi
Friday  stromovka
Saturday  the orchard
Sunday
 in a train at

vrsovice

nadrazi

the next series was "painting reconstruction". By this time steve evonuk and i had constructed our studio in zizkov, and i could finally start working on some bigger pictures. these three are all from zizkov, in fact the shapes of the canvases are that of the three blocks around the studio, and each is a painting of what exists on that irregular rhombus in the city.

  

 

 
     

now we go back to chronogical order, and see my development from reed college days. 
PORTLAND RAIN 0.75 x 0.5M mixed media, 1989
Though at the time I did not think much of them, these photos collaged together with melted encaustic and found objects were very important to later works. The odd shape, multiple images juxtaposed, and 'hard' urban landscape are together for the first, and not the last time.
 
PERSEPHONE AU METRO 0.75 x 0.5M oil on canvas, 1991
We are all trapped on the machines of modern society, like persophone we are underground in Hades held by the jealous gods of capitalism to juice the wheels of progress. On a subway car we dream of a spring never to come, and a past we cannot understand, cut off as we are from nature.
 
THE VIEW FROM SOUTHIE1 x 2M oil on canvas, 1993
But the city is not just a cold blooded machine, we have built it, and even a place such as South Boston can have its nodes of creativity. This was painted when I worked at the Distillery, a former rum distillery now converted to artists studios ...
 
X1 2x2M oil on etched aluminium, 1992-3 X2 2x3.5M oil on etched aluminium, 1992-3
These were Thesis works at Reed College. They attempt to synthesize my painterly education: figuration, abstraction, and the city. The abstract forms, which show up best in this limited web/media are distillations of the forms of the city, meant to rhythmically interact with the abstract painted compostions on each. This was too large a problem for a one semester thesis.
 
NITETRAM ~0.85 x 0.5M oil on canvas, 1996
The Prague night tram is a peculiar place, it would be hard to find public transport in the world with a more consistantly inebriated ridership...including me. Like Persephone au metro I took this piece onto the tram, in this case after missing two previous night trams sitting and waiting at the Derby, and thus having an hour and a half's worth of beer. This painting was mostly spent trying to resolve the drunken inconsistancies of the composition.
 
STROSSMAYEROVO NAM.~0.80 x 0.6M oil on canvas, 1996
This painting I saved for last in this series. I knew that the natural abstractions caused by the tram wires would work with the problems I had started to deal with in my thesis. The idea of creating frames withen the 'frame' of the painting has many antecedents in art, and harks back to the pure realism of the Dutch masters
 
KARLUV MOST0.6 x 1M oil on canvas, 1996
Well I am embarrassed to admit it, but I painted the Charles Bridge. I had to get it out of my system, and I just 'saw' the painting one night, walking with my friend Lara to Malastrana-so I painted it.
 
FLORENCE 1 x 0.5Moil on canvas, 1996
This Painting perhaps captures best a 'real' Prague space of these early series. The diesal emanations of the bus station, with Zizkov and that wonderful tower rising in the backround.