Desert Caravan

I have come up with a way to store my paintings pretty efficiently while I am working on them, and as a result I tend to keep as many as a dozen small paintings going at once. While I am waiting for the paint to dry on one canvas, I put it aside and go back into the racks to see if I can find anything to tune up a little bit. A nice thing about this process is the freedom it gives me to indulge smaller ideas, or ones that seem tangential to my work. I know that if I put something down intitially, even if don't have a plan of how to finish, I will keep coming back to it until it is at least presentable. These little guys have been in the oven for about four months, (mainly due to a struggle I was having with the way to convey my light source without losing information in the dark areas of the painting.) Because they took up so little room in my studio, I was able to let them relax whenever I hit a dead end. In the end I had a vision of how they should look and repainted them from the bottom up in a few hours.

The initial drawings had come out of a two day fascination with gypsy life after watching "Le Vie en Rose." It struck me at the time that for someone looking for a catchall subject to give there work consistency, a caravan of gypsies would provide endless combinations of props and situations, and nearly any sort of object or person could be incorporated without seeming out of place.