
Suffers the Occasional Breakdown
40 x 30
2006 / #1
I worked as a window display person for 2 years for Horne’s department store in Pittsburgh many years ago (1984-86). It was a great job and taught me a lot of skills. I wanted to pay homage to the work and looked to my favorite play on words references. When taking apart a dress form or a window, it is called “breaking it down”. The figure is having a bad day with her window. She is having a breakdown as everything around her appears to break down as well. Follow the baseball as it travels through the window. This ball was the cause of the situation. Maybe I should have said, “Follow the bouncing ball.”
Chairs topple, curtains tear, accessories break, and paint splatters. The items all have price tags so you know it is a retail situation and the scene being set up was a garden party type thing. Her frustrations are evident by her expression. I started with the gesture of the body and worked the rest of the painting around it. The newspaper box and mailbox are to set the scene in a window and the old red bricks were on the outside of my first store. I tried to include as many items as I could remember that were used on my job back in the mid 1980’s.
Juried Shows
2006 “Chaos”, Long Beach Center for the Arts, Long Beach, CA
2009 Canton Art’s League Biennial, Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH
*Honorable Mention