Mixing Mediums, 36" x 48", oil on canvas, 1982. Artist's collection.

This abstracted room/studio interior was a motif that I had developed during this time. At bottom, I wanted to be an abstract painter but I was discovering that creating effective abstractions was easier said than done. More about that later....

This composition is actually a painting of an imaginary piece of movie film which is rendered here "between frames". The edges of the film and the sprocket holes are apparent at the sides of the canvas. The "scene" captured on the "film" is of an artist standing in front of an easel which holds a painting in progress. Outside the window nearest the artist, the artist is being "harassed" by a bird and a palm tree, and outside the far window is an apparitional sketch of the painting on the easel. There are "media" influences such as music blaring from speakers, an open newspaper, and a television on the floor. In the lower of the two frames--a millisecond in the future in "film time"--are a group of bricks falling from an unseen source about to land on the artist's head. This is a comical image, but it also deals with the issues of a conceptual and illusionistic picture plane, and time/space distortions. What also drives this painting in terms of pictorial space is its color scheme utilizing a structure of offset complementary colors. All the green planes of the picture travel in perspective into the red wall, and all of the orange planes of the picture travel in perspective into the blue wall.