"to get 2 Have too keep"
For 12 years I've been going to Cape May, NJ for a late summer vacation with my youngest brother's family. Some nights we'd be on "our" beach and look across the bay and see the lights of Delaware. Well, the moment I first saw this picture in the NY Times, I could almost feel the wind blowing and it just took me right back to those summer nights. So I "captured" it by collaging it to the green background and it stayed like that for some time; always rekindling the memory. Then one day, a phrase came to me (the way it does with so many of my paintings) "to get, 2 have, too keep". After pondering the notion that this might tend to sum up our existence; what we do and what makes us happy, it just made sense to say it on this painting. Why does it say snake at the bottom ? Well, in the green abstraction, I saw a snake trying to gobble up the dream - so I gave him some white fangs and wrote "snake".
For me, this painting pretty much sums up how I think about and go about making my art.
