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My painting has for some time concerned itself with incorporating well-known images by other artists and sculptural objects in shallow spaces----Nature Morte (still life) paintings and prints. So it was inevitable that Richard Caldwell Brewer paintings---stored in my studio—--would find their way into my work, along with Park, Diebenkorn, Bischoff, Heckel, Bosman, Riley, and Warhol. And some of my own work. Like a bower bird, I’ve added fabric collected in India, carvings, candlesticks, Guatemalan wooden dogs, Weller pottery frog, and other bric-a- brac. 

Many of the paintings from 2014-2016 depicting my studio and its contents include paintings by Brewer (1923-2014). Brewer was a longtime friend and mentor, from our meeting in 1979. While obscure in his lifetime, his largely homoerotic paintings, drawings, and frank journal may get him exposure in his deathtime. He was a contemporary/friend of Robert De Niro Sr., Nell Blaine, Leland Bell, and Samuel Wagstaff. Nineteen Brewer paintings were acquired by the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

That series--—perhaps somewhat fraught with themes of mortality and loss--—ended with the Top of the Stairs painting.  It’s also been the last painting of an interior--—I’ve moved outdoors with subject matter, out of the literal and metaphoric confines of the studio.