The Painting Series “Spell Chrysanthemum” and “Bovine Bones”

My next-door neighbor Henry (a jazz musician) gave me a discarded bouquet of flowers.

I’ve always wanted to paint flowers like Henri de Fantin-Latour but this work is more in line with the drunken ghost of Willem de Kooning (after all, he lived up the street once).

My favorite flower to work from is the zinnia purchased from a sly Hungarian florist who speaks under his breath of the former Soviet Block.

“Spell Chrysanthemum” is a punch line to a joke I heard in the mid-eighties about a man trying to enter heaven.

I’ve been in possession of an old cow bone (actually two vertebrae fused together) for quite a while. The shape is endlessly fascinating especially by the light of campfire in my cave.