I combine painting from perception and imagination, using strong color harmonies, scale dislocation, cubism and foreshortening - which make forms project into space as shapes stack up on the picture-plane. Recent still lifes appropriate master works by Freud, Caravaggio, etc.

Atlantic City, which is based on a Monopoly board and where I lived 4 years, continues to inspire. Its poetic vistas and small scale sculptural quality reminded me The Eternal City, where I lived 8 years. But instead of gravity, irony is ever-present in an R. Crumb way.

I went to Rome on a Fulbright, my project was to study saints and apply their strange fusion of the neurotic and sublime to portraiture. That led to Arcimboldo-inspired 'criptosanti' aka 'headworks,' architectural headresses. Teaching "Drawing Monuments" there, I began painting still lifes as visionary cities, a la di Chirico, and eventually placed figures in them - my giant series.