Oil on Canvas

“I was born during the ‘Great Depression,’ which followed the biggest meltdown that Wall Street has ever known. It was the inspiration for my painting of a more recent meltdown on America’s Wall Street.

Many of my bittersweet memories begin with fantasies starting in a cast iron frying pan. I remember my mother sobbing as if our world was coming to an end – then I started sobbing because she was sobbing.  All our tears disappeared when my father appeared to turn a bowl of beer batter into jumping horses and dancing girls kicking up their heels in the sizzling pan of bubbling oil.  Besides his hotcakes, he would enrapture my sister and me with a magic show of coloring eggs. Dad would dip hard boiled eggs into an oil mixture of brilliant colors; swirling them up and down and round and round into a kaleidoscope of images that tickled my imagination. That’s how it all began – a bittersweet introduction to the wonderland of ART – it was the key that opened a door to the magical world of make believe, where I learned to see the light beyond the dark cloud hovering over our country’s ‘Great Depression’… it helped me to cope with my own form of dark cloud depression.”