The statement, from the LA show:
This body of work is drawn from paintings of society women done by Jean Dominique Ingres, the French Classical painter of the 19th Century. The paintings started as a continuation of previous figurative works, with an interest in the formal aspects of the source paintings - the pose, the rendering of materials and so forth - but soon turned to what I saw as the artifice in Ingres' work. The idealization of the figures and the idealization of the environments hid the artistic license Ingres took with the anatomy of the women. So I pushed that incongruity by incorporating further the figures in an abstract context. Like engenders like and from these paintings arose the strictly abstract work, included here, the two paintings Belle Epoque - I and Belle Epoque - II. My present work continues in that vein.
