My friend Bob. In his dreams.
This is a scene from a small town in southern Portugal, called Olhão in the Algarve. The town no longer looks like this. Many of the buildings have been replaced with high-rise structures.
The giant black mountain in the background was an obstacle for many people, but some found a way to get through. The fist time I went to El Paso, I was riding in a car with a friend on a freeway that ran along the Rio Grande. All of sudden, a group of young men came...
I imagined witnessing a haboob in the Tucson Sam Hughes neighborhood.
This is Nogales, Mexico, the border town just south of Tucson. This painting is mostly accurate, but I had to shorten the length of the very wide La Caverna restaurant so that it could all fit.
The San Xavier Mission is also known as the white dove of the desert. It’s considered by many art historians to be the most beautiful mission in the country. Inside the church, many visitors see the reclining statue in the glass case in the west transept, and...
We found out too late that Marrakesh rug salesmen are reputed to be the most high-pressured salesmen in the world. We bought five rugs we didn’t even like.
Our House in Norwalk, Connecticut. My studio was on the left.
I read about a collection of albino animals and painted my version of an albino farm. I limited the colors to skin tones of all races: white, brown, black, yellow, and red.
The Algarve is in the countryside of Southern Portugal. Much of the architecture is from the Moors, dating back centuries. The structure at the upper left is a Roman ruin.
Flags on every house in this New England town symbolize the mourning of 9-11. Flowers in the foreground are anemonies, which have historically symbolized sorrow and death in art. The two shafts of rain in the background represent the Twin Towers.
I took the crosstown bus in New York one day. It was always full of interesting characters. A friend photographed the ads at the top. They are all real.
Just a mining town in Arizona.
A painting of my friend’s son, Arun.
In retrospect, this early tsunami painting’s colors look a bit too cheerful to me, so I’ve done another.
I’ve always liked pigs and have painted a lot of them. I had a show in a museum in Connecticut in the ’70s. A few weeks later, they had a fundraiser and asked me if I would donate a painting. This is what they got.
The Blessing of the Animals celebration at St. Philips Episcopal Church in the Foothills of Tucson, Arizona.
A friend of mine is a lawyer who always wanted to be a bartender. He never got the chance. I think this painting is as close as he got. The names on each of the bottle labels have stories that pertain to his wife and children.
The cats of a good friend.
Los Angeles, kitsch to culture. Growing up here, I remember the dog restaurant, which was shaped like a giant Fox Terrier. This was shown in Japan to more than a million people. It is the biggest-sized painting I’ve ever done and it took seven months to complete...
I was delighted to see lovely wild cranes on a visit to Florida.
In the 20th century, when multitudes paid homage to abstract art, (and still do), archangels were critics whose messages served to warn, interpret, and guide the true believers of the art world. This is one of a series of four archangel paintings. I read a lot of art...
In the 20th century, when multitudes paid homage to art (and still do), archangels were critics whose messages served to warn, interpret and guide the true believers of the art world. Raphael (Hilton Kramer) healed blindness with the ashes of a dead fish and troubled...
In the 20th century, when multitudes paid homage to art (and still do), archangels were critics whose messages served to warn, interpret and guide the true believers of the art world. Uriel (Robert Hughes), the sharpest sighted spirit in all of Heaven, warned of...
In the 20th century, when multitudes paid homage to art (and still do), archangels were critics whose messages served to warn, interpret and guide the true believers of the art world. Gabriel (Tom Wolfe), identified by the Cabalists as “the man clothed in linen”,...
French native Luigi lived with us while my daughter was living in Singapore. If we left him alone in the house, he would destroy it.
Lulu hated children and old men but loved everyone else, and otherwise was a very sweet dog.
Around the turn of the century, a severe earthquake shook Tucson, Arizona. The shaking was so violent that it launched huge boulders through the air, which can be seen to this day on the road to Mt. Lemmon.
This a painting of a mural I painted on my drab, grey car, a Citroën Deux Chevaux. The mural was the first painting I’d ever done. The day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died was the day that I finished painting the mural. It’s not shown in the painting...
When I was living in Connecticut I was reading the New York Times one day and saw on the front cover a building in Hollywood on fire. I grew up in the area as a child and was very familiar with it. Among the people driving out to safety were my daughter and her...
We had a large fishpond up in the Tucson foothills. My neighbor’s children brought by two fish that they had been given for free at McDonalds, and asked if they could put them in the fish pond. Next we looked, there were 85 of them. Later, herons stopped by and...
Floods are a part of my fascination with natural disasters. This painting does not depict an actual event. It was how I imagined what a real flood would look like.
I’ve done quite a few still lifes, but had very few of them photographed.
Freud loved dogs. At the end of his work day, it seemed to me, the dogs must get up on his couch just as our dogs do.
I’ve been concerned about the environment and global warming for a long time. It greatly concerns me that there is so much apathy about necessary changes that must be made.
This painting resides in the permanent collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut. At the time, this museum was one of three museums in the country that specialized in American art. A woman I met was talking about self-taught...
PT Barnum was so afraid that people would forget about the circus in the winter when it was closed, that he had a man dressed in a turban guide an elephant through a field of greens so that passengers on the train riding by would be reminded of the circus. PT Barnum...
My husband and I were in Italy and went to a sculpture garden. No one knows who designed the sculptures. Two magazine articles described the sculptures. The authors described the large animal as a hound dog that had eaten its baby. This is NOT what is happening in...
Grusha was captured in Siberia and brought to Moscow to perform in the circus. He became the star of the circus but was miserable. One night his trainer had too much vodka and forgot to lock Grusha’s cage. He got on his bicycle and rode 25 miles before he was...
The daughter of a close friend of mine in Brooklyn, New York was the Head Mistress of a preschool called Hands on World. I painted some murals in the school.
This is a house I came across during my visit to Portugal.
I worked in an art gallery where I learned a great deal about art. The owner told me that if you put two patterns together, it won’t work, but if you put three or more, it will work. I started painting 10 years later and remembered what she told me. This is my...
This was my grandparents’ house in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills. The man at the top of the hill is Harry the Hermit. He had an American Flag and a bathtub, and nothing else (that we knew of). In the foreground you can see my grandmother in her Chevy....
At the time that I painted this, monsoon storms in Tucson were quite dramatic, much more so than now.
I love manatees and wanted to depict their home in the sea with the water hyacinths that they eat and a quiet sailboat sailing by in the distance.
Monsoon storms in Tucson used to be more dramatic than they are now.
My dining room with most of our pets.
Long ago in Norwalk, Connecticut, pigs were allowed to run free and they were capable of doing damage!
St. Hubert was the patron saint of the dog that we know today as the Basset Hound. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Basset Hounds. The person posing as St. Hubert here is actually Herb Hyman, who was friend of mine. The shoes were the actual shoes...
Poire William is a pear brandy. Each bottle contains a whole pear, which is a mystery to those not knowing how such a large object could fit through the small mouth of the bottle. The secret is that bottles are placed over the pear blossoms which grow in the bottle....
This is a portrait of the late Louise Spizizen, a good friend of mine who was a harpsichordist.
This work is now in a collection in France, in a museum that exhibits the paintings of self-taught artists. This is the oldest house in Tucson, which itself is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the United States.
Our fish pond in Tucson was visited everyday, sometimes more than once, by our neighbor’s dog, who enjoyed bathing in it. She never bothered the fish. Other animals, including the quail and rabbit in the painting, enjoyed the pond as well.
Ganda was an Indian rhinoceros sent on a ship by the King of Portugal from Goa to Rome as a present to the Pope for his menagerie. The ship sank on the way and Ganda drowned. He washed ashore and a taxidermist of the Vatican Museum restored his remains. The fate of...
I was inspired to paint these sheep when I saw them on a relief on Chartres Cathedral in France.
Semana Santa, a festival in Spain, is one of the most dramatic human-made events I’ve ever seen. Tho floats depicting the stations of the cross are carried on the backs of men many of whom come from surrounding villages to earn money . Some of them wear shoes...
This was one of my early works. It won an award in a show. I painted this sheep because I thought he looked like George Washington.
Obsolete Red Bird subway cars were dropped into the ocean off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey to create artificial reefs that would attract fish and edible marine life. Initially, there was great opposition to it, even among environmental groups, who worried that...
I love the architecture, now mostly in ruins, that the Moors left in the Algarve region of Portugal.
During the Revolutionary War, William Tryon was the British general who planned and carried out the burning of towns along the Connecticut coast. Supposedly he sat on a Windsor chair on a hill and watched as the town of Norwalk burned. I’d been painting for a...
The first tornado I saw was from an airplane window. Twenty years later, I used the memory of that tornado to depict the one in this painting.
I read about in the newspaper about a woman who saw the face of Jesus in the scorch marks on one of the tortillas she was making. After that her husband gave up drinking and thousands of people came to their house to see that tortilla.
Mt. St. Helens in Oregon erupted in 1980. Everyone in the area was ordered to evacuate, but 83-year-old Harry R. Truman, who had lived near the mountain for 54 years, refused to leave. In this painting he sits in his Appalachian chair surrounded by his 13 cats and...
I lived in Buffalo, New York for few years, where I witnessed blizzards. In California where I grew up, I had never seen one before.
I imagined a tsunami of the coast of California crashing in at night when everyone was asleep. I saw the house in the front on postcard. It was where Richard Nixon was born.
The Chernobyl disaster happened in April of 1986. The people who lived in that region of the Ukraine believed that the apocalypse was happening because of a number of coincidences with the Book of Revelations. When the reactor blew it launched a fireball into the...
An imaginary look through the eye of a tornado.
We went to Merida Spain to see the Roman ruins. I was distracted by a pair of nesting storks on top of an elaborate, colorful building. The storks were loved by the people who lived there, and all the visitors as well.
My daughter got a turtle when she was little and it died. We got another turtle but this time we called the Audoban Society to find out what we did wrong. They gave us the name of herpetologist in Westchester county an hour away. We were advised to feed him little...
My first granddaughter was born in France. I painted a picture of a white horse for her. The pink car in the background is a Deux Chevaux, literally, “two horses”, which referred to its two horsepower engine.
This raven was an amusing character and I enjoyed working with this color combination.
Black swans are native to Australia and are the state bird of Western Australia.
