Sometimes it is best to let things hang in limbo. Sometimes it happens all on its' own. Sometimes you're not ready to finish it, or at a place where you have the understanding of what is coming next, or where it is going, or what it is to be. It suspends. I painted this painting in N.Y. It was the last painting I did while I lived there. Well, basically the last one. There was a point at which I couldn't make such huge paintings anymore...and had to prepare my place so I could leave it. N.Y. for me in my mind is that place I left behind in abeyance. Even though I know much has changed about N.Y. since I moved to Los Angeles, in my heart I still think of N.Y. as the place I moved to in 1988. Big, mysterious, full of energy and life and fear and possibility. Some of the people in this painting I knew, was, met, hoped to be, encountered, and left. Other's are ghosts. I am a ghost of N.Y. now. Friends tell me they walk by my old apartment, and still think of me as being there. Sometimes at night as I fall asleep I imagine myself back there, in my apartment just as it was when I lived there...I see the red light on the M of the Milford Plaza, casting its' shadow on my wall. I light up a cigarette and listen to the wolves of the night as the drive up 8th Avenue in their yellow taxi, or leave a bar on 46th Street. My window open if even just a crack in the middle of winter, to hear, smell, taste, and feel the air of the City. Surprising how quiet my apartment could be even in the middle of all of this. That apartment was a channel and a window for many souls, spirits, beings...coming through. I wonder if the person living there knows this? Knows all the magic that happened there. All the prayers that were said, the dreams that filtered through the night, the starlight of my friends who shared time with me...laying on the floor at 3 am listening to Gorecki and smoking. The past hangs in abeyance, and you carry it with you. Your whole life through.
Abeyance: Oil on Canvas 10'x5'
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